Some major improvements are coming to the Laguna Lake Dog Park.
Chili Dog and his owner visit the dog park a few times a week.
"He wants to just play, play, play. This is a great park," said Chili Dog's owner, Dustin Weiss.
At Tuesday night's San Luis Obispo City Council meeting, a budget was approved along with a construction contract for the revitalization of the Laguna Lake Dog Park.
"I think that it's long overdue," said Dan Takaoka, a dog park user. "There's a lot of dirt and gopher holes, you know, it's definitely a little rough here."
Greg Avakian from the city’s Parks and Recreation department says the project has been in the works for years.
"We are going to institute a small dog area and a large dog area for some safety and liability, plus have some added seating and some more benches and really more ADA pathways to be more accessible for all our community," Avakian explained. "We're really out there trying to grade it down, add some traditional turf for the dogs to use, as well as mulch and pea gravel."
This is the current design shown on the Parks and Recreation website:
A member of the city’s tree committee says they’re requesting permission to remove two trees at the dog park and plant more than 30 more.
For users of the dog park, one concern is what they will do during the construction.
"Hopefully they can figure out a way to do it half and half," said Tim Golden, who was visiting the dog park on Thursday. "It'd be terrible if we don't really have this because it's really all we got."
Avakian says they are working to figure out the best way to go about that during construction.
He says they hope to break ground on the project soon.
"We have a pre-construction meeting that will set up expectations of the project, a timeline, and we're having that conversation in early fall," Avakian said. "And our goal is to really break ground in the middle of fall, and it's probably anywhere from 4-6 months."
More information on the timeline is expected to be available by the middle of next week.
