Oxford’s furry friends will have a new place to play come the end of October, as Oxford City Council members approved the development of a new dog park at the Sept. 17 meeting. The construction on the new dog park, which will be located off Bonham Road, is already underway and will be completed in three to four weeks.
Casey Wooddell, director of Oxford’s parks and recreation services, said the initial decision to open a new dog park in town started in 2022, when city staff recognized that the current dog park, Northside Bark located on Morning Sun Road, is too small for the use demanded.
“It’s too many people, too many dogs and too much traffic, [where] it just creates more of a mud hole sometimes than it does a dog park,” Wooddell said. “And so it gets very difficult to maintain because we can’t really close it without closing the entire park.”
When the new project was initially discussed, Wooddell worked with an urban planning class at Miami University to conduct an analysis of the best location for the new park. City staff settled on the location near Yager Stadium because it is a city-owned property with availability for parking and further development. The cost of the park is $62,000.
Wooddell said he hopes the development of the new dog park will encourage students and Oxford residents alike to utilize the park, many of whom do not have a place to take their pets.
“The current dog park serves both people that live in Oxford and students that live in Oxford,” Wooddell said. “Sometimes people forget that students have dogs too, and even though they’re only here for, you know, eight or nine months of the year, they also need a place to take their dogs because they don’t have [a yard].”
Lily Dragon, a junior speech pathology major at Miami, said she looks forward to utilizing the new park with her dog, Spike.
“My dog comes to visit about twice a month with my mom, and we usually take him to Hamilton to get out of people’s way, because not everyone likes dogs,” Dragon said. “It will be nice to have a designated place where I can take him when he comes.”
The new park will be enclosed by a fence and include amenities such as a drinking fountain and park benches. Wooddell said the city is also working on planting shade trees and possibly constructing a shade structure, depending on the coverage of the trees.
The current dog park will remain in operation while construction is underway, and city staff will monitor the usage of it and make a further determination on whether both parks are then needed. If the newer park is determined to be more popular, the existing park may be converted back to a neighborhood park, which was its primary purpose before being used as a dog park.
