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CedarVale Park for Dogs or People

February 12, 2008

Ball diamond becomes off-leash park for dogs

Curtis Rush
Staff Reporter - Toronto Star https://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/276802

Dogs are now running free in a newly created off-leash area in Greenwood Park that until recent days was a ball park.

The park, which is located in the Leslieville neighbourhood near Gerrard St. E. and Greenwood Ave. boasts three baseball diamonds and a soccer pitch.

However, one baseball diamond on the southwest side of the park is now fenced to allow dog owners to let their pets run off-leash.

The decision to fence off the diamond has caused anger among some people who say that there wasn’t enough consultation with people who use the park.

The decision was made at a community meeting Tuesday night. However, many people say they didn’t receive notice of the meeting until the next day when a flyer landed in their mailboxes.

Although even some dog-owners complained that the decision seemed to be rushed, others see it as a tempest in a teapot.

Baseball season is over, they say. No one is using the baseball diamonds.

One neighbour said soccer league officials complained that the dogs were ruining the soccer pitch, giving impetus to the community meeting.

The fencing went up so quickly, many neighbours were surprised to see it.

Some dog owners told the Toronto Star that prior to the fence going up, they would let their dogs roam leash-free when no one was looking or if there weren’t many people in the park.

Now that the fencing is up, these dog owners can let their dogs run free without fear of contravening a city bylaw.

Parks committee chairman Paula Fletcher Fletcher, reached by phone today in Victoria, B.C., denied that flyers only went out late Tuesday afternoon.

“We’ve been sending out emails and flyers for the last couple of weeks,” she said.

This issue has not just come up, she said, adding that talk of making changes to the park began in the spring and hundreds of people signed petitions to make changes to the park, she said.

Fletcher said she’s surprised at the outrage. She added that she is angry that this is being portrayed as a new off-leash area.

The park was already an off-leash park over four acres, with restrictions from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and there was strict enforcement of the policy, she said.

Fletcher added that the baseball diamond fenced off had only one permit issued in the last year for it to be used for a game. “The diamond was not in use,” she said.

The city councillor said also that this decision does not mean it’s permanent. “This is an ongoing process. This is not the Berlin wall. It’s a snow fence.”

David Butler, a stay-at-home dad who lives near the park, was upset about the decision and complained to Fletcher’s office and to the office of the mayor.

Butler, who doesn’t own a dog, is upset because of the way the decision came down. “Where’s the democratic process?” he said in an interview.

He received an email notification of the meeting last week, but the notice didn’t say anything about a vote being held, Butler complained.

Flyers weren’t distributed in the neighbourhood until 4 p.m. on Tuesday, only three hours before the meeting, he charged.

And the flyers were printed in English-only and the area has a high proportion of Chinese-speaking people, he said.

“This is not democracy,” Butler said. “There are hundreds of homes on the other side of the park that didn’t receive the flyer.”

Butler attended the meeting at Leslieville Public School, but was in the minority and the vote passed easily among the 70 or 80 people who attended.

Butler says he can produce as many as a hundred people who didn’t get to attend the meeting and would have voted down the decision.

He said he believes city staff knew the fence was going up by the time the meeting was held. They would have known the measurements in order to construct the fence, he said.

The fence started going up at 10 a.m., only 12 hours after the meeting, Butler charged.

Butler said he has complained about off-leash dogs running through the park in the past.

He said that a few years ago, one dog ran over his daughter, who was 3 at the time.

Although the park isn’t used by baseball players at this time of year, he said the decision to fence off the ball diamond can only be revisited after a year.

“So this issue isn’t going away,” he said.

Written by doglover · Filed Under Local Resources 

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