About the Grant for the Dog Park

Yesterday, Gossips announced that the Hudson Dog Park was a finalist in the PetSafe Bark for Your Park™ grant competition and urged readers to vote once a day every day to help the Hudson Dog Park win a $5,000 grant. Today, we'll provide some background information about how this came to pass.

As many Gossips readers know, the Hudson Dog Park opened on October 26, 2019, after years of effort to make it happen. The dog park was built on land owned by the City of Hudson--a remediated brownfield that was the site of Foster's Refrigerator--with $14,000 raised by the community. The Department of Public Works mows the lawn, hauls away the trash, and plows the driveway and parking lot in winter, but all other expenses of maintaining and improving the dog park are paid for by contributions from users and supporters of the dog park.

At present, the dog park has the bare necessities for a dog park: fences, poop bag dispensers, and trash barrels. Since the dog park opened, user input and research into best practices have been used to develop a Master Plan for park amenities and improvements. 

In June, the Hudson Dog Park applied for a PetSafe Bark for Your Park™ grant. As an existing dog park, the Hudson Dog Park can receive $5,000 in this nationwide grant program funded by PetSafe. A panel of judges at PetSafe scored all the submissions on "the level of enthusiasm and support for a dog park project within the community and the impact that a dog park project will have on the community" and identified thirty finalists. The Hudson Dog Park is among those thirty finalists. Which of the finalists will be the recipients of five $25,000 grants for new park construction and five $5,000 grants for enhancements to existing parks will be determined by the number of votes each dog park receives. The contest voting period started yesterday and continues through August 31. People can vote once a day every day during that period.

A basic amenity that the Hudson Dog Park lacks is shade. On sweltering hot summer days, the dog park can be a pretty uncomfortable place to be, for people as well as dogs. With summers getting hotter every year, things will only get worse. If the Hudson Dog Park wins a grant, the $5,000 will be used to build a shade structure to bring relief from the hot sun both for dogs and people. But the votes of everyone in the community are needed to make it happen.

For the month of August, I will be using Gossips as a bully pulpit to get readers to vote for the Hudson Dog Park every day. It is so easy. Just click on the image at the top of the right column and vote. If you're reading this on your phone and you don't see the image, the URL is easy to remember: barkforyourpark.com. 

The dogs of Hudson will thank you--especially this guy!