Burnet Woods Dog Park: Taxpayer Money Literally Going to the Dogs
A Digital Rendering of the proposed dog park back in 2023.
Since 2020, there’s been a battle between the Cincinnati Parks Board and Clifton citizens over plans to convert 8,800 square feet of Burnet Woods into a dog park. In that amount of time, the Cincinnati Parks Board has been inundated by at least a thousand emails and messages from opponents of the project. A petition against the dog park has garnered over 1,500 signatures. A few years back, Corryville, CUF, and Clifton’s community councils even asked the Park Board to stop the project. As recently as this winter, a group called Preserve Burnet Woods has been out protesting the dog park. However, no matter how much negative feedback the project receives, the Park Board trudges on with plans to construct the dog park, highlighting how easy it is for bourgeois political powers to outright ignore the will of the people.
Not Elected by the People
The Cincinnati Park Board is made up of five members appointed by Mayor Aftab Pureval— not the people. The Board is not required to do anything with comments and feedback they receive from the public on the projects and initiatives they pursue no matter how much backlash there may be. This allows them to entirely disregard Clifton residents’ concerns about the dog park project and move forward with it no matter how many people speak out against it. Board members are shockingly not required to have special knowledge of ecology or environmental issues. As a result, the current Board is rife with capitalist ruling class interests.
There are also concerns of alleged conflicts of interest with some Park Board members having ties to local development companies. Molly North, Park Board President and one of the most vocal supporters of the dog park within the Board, is currently the CEO of Merus, a commercial real estate developer in the Cincinnati area. Before that, she served as CEO of yet another Cincinnati-based real estate development company called Al. Neyer. Interestingly (to say the least), Al. Neyer was founded by the family of another Park Board member, John Neyer. John himself founded the largest property management company in the region, Neyer Management. It’s not unreasonable to assume that the Board members with development interests would push for developments that catalyze higher property values and gentrification. Board member Susan Castellini is the wife of the CEO of the Cincinnati Reds and daughter of John Michael Fox, founder of Minute Maid and President of United Fruit Company, which would eventually become Chiquita Bananas. Considering the vast wealth that Castellini and her husband hold, and the fact that her own father oversaw a business known for overthrowing democratically-elected governments in South America, massacring protesting workers, and fueling drug cartels, it’s no surprise she holds a position on a committee that so flippantly ignores the demands of working-class Cincinnatians who want their green spaces to remain green spaces.
Similarly to the Park Board, the Cincinnati Parks Foundation — a private NGO acting as the “project advocate” tasked with handling the community fundraising for this project — has members who work as executives at banks and real estate companies like Fifth Third Bank, Coldwell Banker Realty, the Tiffany Collective, and Wealth Dimensions Group.
These entities are intentionally structured to not be held accountable by the people. The Cincinnati Park Board being required to hold public meetings and take public comment, while being able to turn around and wholly ignore those comments, is a smaller-scale example of fundamental, large-scale contradictions in capitalist systems of governance.
The Financial and Ecological Costs
This dog park will cost a pretty penny: in July 2024, Cincinnati Park Board Director Jason Barron announced that the price of constructing the dog park had increased by 40% to $566,000 due to the rising cost of turf. Even after a cheaper design was drawn up without turf, the cost still sits at over $380,000, and Cincinnati Parks is still waiting to scrape together the funding needed for construction. This is, in part, due to the fact that the project is reliant on community fundraising. Unsurprisingly – considering how unpopular the project is in the community – the fundraising has been very slow, which is part of the reason this project has dragged on for years. There are other Burnet Woods projects identified in the Parks Master Plan that would be a more worthy use of this money but haven’t been prioritized, such as road repavings, ADA-compliant restrooms and pathways, and more.
This development will also have harmful ecological impacts. These include the destruction of green space and natural habitats due to the construction of the park, harm to the surrounding tree canopy, and damage caused to waterways and ecosystems by fecal and urine runoff. Feces runoff would go into the combined sewer system (which has been known to flood parts of the park) and into the fishing pond downhill from the dog park. This would spread harmful bacteria and viruses into waterways. Dog urine also disrupts soil chemistry and the nutrient balance of the surrounding ecosystems. These concerns will be exacerbated if Cincinnati Parks is unable to maintain the park properly, which isn’t unlikely. Parks rely heavily on volunteer labor for maintenance, and other dog parks under their purview (such as Doris Day in Mt Airy) have fallen into disarray in the past due to lack of upkeep.
Accelerating Gentrification
As Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels explained, the enclosure of arable land by the English landed aristocracy in the late Middle Ages was one of the original acts of capitalism. “Enclosure,” in this sense, meant withdrawing the rights of peasants living on feudal estates to use the land. Many researchers have compared gentrification to enclosure; gentrification encloses land through over policing, private roads and parking lots, and rent increases.
Sociologist Sylvie Tissot’s research shows that dog park advocates frequently use pro-gentrification rhetoric in making their case by calling the parks “a way of promoting neighborhood safety, and [as] an incentive for business.” Tissot’s work implies that dog parks, no matter how well-intentioned or rationalized, serve as anchors for gentrification.
According to the Park Board, “The dog park will provide a new recreation experience for area residents and their dogs, further contributing to the attractiveness and quality of life for park visitors and residents of Clifton, Corryville, and CUF.” Cincinnati Parks also claims that “along with other proposed improvements to the park, [it] would bring more people into the parks, which will help improve its image.” This rhetoric reveals the real motivations of the city through the Cincy Park Board: to make Clifton attractive to businesses and real estate developers and improve its image for wealthy out-of-town investors.
Ignoring Community Demands
As stated previously, Cincinnati Parks continues to ignore the voice of the community at all levels, from individual emails opposing the project all the way to letters from the surrounding neighborhoods’ community councils requesting the project not move forward. Embarrassingly, Park Board members repeatedly requested community members who do support the project (assuming there are any) to be more vocal.
The plan to build a dog park in the Clifton area goes back even further than this site in Burnet Woods; their original target was Dunore Park on Ludlow Ave. After facing pushback from the community over that location, Cincinnati Parks set their sights on Burnet Woods.
Inspired by the failed Dunore Park dog park project, a set of Clifton Dog Park Principles was approved at a Clifton Town Meeting in May 2021 as an attempted safeguard against Cincinnati Parks. The principles state that a dog park in Clifton must not take away from Cincinnati Parks green space, have adequate parking, have a clear funding source identified, and consider concerns of immediate neighbors. It goes without saying that Parks has blatantly disregarded these principles throughout the planning process for the park in Burnet Woods.
This project is simply frivolous spending of taxpayer money by bourgeois city leadership and developers on something that nobody wants. (After all, it’s not like Clifton residents can’t already bring their dogs into the park.) This money would be better spent by Cincinnati Parks on much-needed repairs and maintenance in Burnet Woods, such as a set of stairs that Parks has been aware have needed repairs for at least the last 2 years.
This flailing project serves as a prime example of how the systems of governance we live under are not designed to represent working-class interests or demands. A handful of individuals with questionable motives (who were not even elected by the community) should not be able to push through questionable, unwanted, and unnecessary projects at the taxpayers’ expense. The people making decisions about public spaces — and all other public goods — should be democratically elected by the people, and should be held directly responsible to the interests of those who elected them, or face dismissal at any time for failure to do so.
While Cincinnatians are justly proud of Cincy’s splendid parks and playgrounds, no park system should be operated as the private estate of the ruling class.
Editor’s Note:
After we posted our original statement, the Cincinnati Parks Board decided to walk back one of their initial promises that garnered them a sliver of goodwill with the community they are actively ignoring. After promising the new tax-levied half-million-dollar Burnet Woods Dog Park would be universally accessible, Cincinnati Parks Executive Director Jason Baron admitted this is not actually the case. There will be no striped handicap parking, no ramp built into the curb of the sidewalk, and part of the park will not even be level ground. The Cincy Parks Board included ADA accessibility features in the initial proposal to score brownie points with the larger community and to sway a vote in their favor from Cincinnati City Council when seeking funding, and have now attempted to roll it back to save time and money in the hopes that nobody would notice.
Cincinnati Parks is guilty of exploiting the disabled community for their own financial gain. This, once again, proves that not only will the capitalist ruling class use public spaces as their own private property to do whatever they please with, but they can lie and cheat to do so without being held accountable to anybody. This is not a flaw of the capitalist system; it is simply what it’s designed for. The capitalist state, with all its supposed rules, is designed to protect the property and the interests of the ruling class.