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Dog park consultant Marilynn Glasser was invited to offer her expertise, but it wasn’t long until the Town Board’s differing opinions on the matter took center stage.
While many thought the location of Wampus Brook Park had all but been decided as the dog park location, Town Board members Michael Schiliro and Stephen D’Angelo said that's not the case.
“So, when will we have a proposal and where’s it coming from?” asked Schiliro. “I’m looking for something we can review, regarding all the considerations we’ve talked about.”
Town Supervisor Howard Arden and John Cronin explained that since part of the property is owned by the DOT, they have to approve it before any next steps are taken.
“The big thing is the DOT has to sign off on the property.”
Cronin elaborated, “I guess it’s my view is that putting together the cost is a relatively quick exercise. Once we have the go-ahead from the DOT, we’ll do it,” he said. “There’s no point of going through the exercise of getting a proposal together until whether we know we can do it or not.”
This was news to Schiliro.
“Are you saying that’s the site of the dog park? It sounds like a decision’s been made. I’m just confused as to what the process is.”
Arden replied, “The Rec Department has recommended that site. That’s the assumption I’m going under.”
When asked by D’Angelo if the board would get the opportunity—after a DOT approval—to review an official proposal, conduct meetings and give the public a chance to chime in on the matter, Cronin said, “Of course.”
In response to Schiliro claiming the majority of the dog park process has been conducted behind closed doors, Councilwoman Diane DiDonato-Roth pointed out that Wednesday’s meeting was anything but.
“Just so you understand, we actually scheduled this work session to update you on where we are with the meetings we’ve had. People that have been included in the dog park discussion is our town planner, our town engineer, our insurance agent, our town lawyer, Howard Arden was there—I was there—we had some residents from North Castle, a dog trainer,” she said.
“You were not able to attend, we knew you were coming today—we didn’t want to burden you so much. So we’ve had a rather large conglomerate of professionals involved in coming up with the solutions that will get us to the place we need to be,” she added.
D’Angelo took offense to this, asking DiDonato-Roth, “So you’re just saying we’re having this work session so Mike and I can know what you three have done over the last four months?”
Arden said that was not the case.
“That obviously is not true because we’ve discussed it publicly how many times?” he asked. “At some point we would have to vote on this and at that time the public would have ample time to discuss it.”
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