Metro Denver’s largest off-leash dog park could be cut to less than a tenth of its size as Westminster city officials look for ways to reduce the strain of a million visits a year on protected prairie land.
The prospect of drawing down the off-leash area at Westminster Hills Open Space from 420 acres — occupying nearly half the property footprint — to about 32 acres has dog owners howling in protest. Several said they relish the wind-whipped prairie park, located northwest of Simms Street and West 100th Avenue, which comes complete with a stunning view of the Rocky Mountains and, to the south, Standley Lake.
“I think it’s sad,” said Rachel Robertson, who visits from her home in Denver a couple of times a week to let her golden doodle, Naya, stretch her legs. “These kinds of dog parks are a great way for them to get their energy out.”
At a community meeting Wednesday night, Westminster city officials will lay out several potential options to manage the property, from leaving it as it is to severely curtailing off-leash use. A decision is still months away.
But the city already has received more than 1,000 emails about Westminster Hills, and a Change.org petition seeking to keep the property “completely off-leash” has garnered more than 5,400 signatures.
“It’s huge,” Westminster City Councilwoman Kristine Ireland, who took office in December, said about the response. “Most of them are upset.”
Wednesday’s meeting, which begins at 6:30 p.m. at City Park Recreation Center, 10455 Sheridan Blvd., is expected to be well attended.
This week the city began taking applications to seat a community advisory team of nine to 11 members whose job it will be to winnow down the options that will be unveiled at Wednesday’s meeting. Those alternatives were not publicly available Tuesday.
The City Council is expected to pick a final course of action sometime this summer.
Keeping open space fit for wildlife
The open space serves as shortgrass prairie habitat for the black-tailed prairie dog, bald eagle, western burrowing owl and northern leopard frog. Trying to keep it fit for wildlife is a tough slog in the face of a daily onslaught of dogs, said city spokesman Andy Le.
Dogs flush out ground-dwelling birds, and their nitrogen-rich feces promote “the growth of nonnative plants at the expense of native plants,” according to a city study released late last year.
The city hauled 350,000 pounds of dog waste out of the open space property in 2023, Le said. Some of the dog poop never made it to a trash can.
When the city began assembling Westminster Hills Open Space in phases, with the first land purchase made in 1988, officials say, it was never intended to be a dog park. It now spans 1,000-plus acres.
The property became canine-friendly in 2000 when the city launched a one-year pilot for an off-leash area on 27 acres. The city expanded the off-leash zone to the entire open space property in 2008, before dialing it back to just over 400 acres the next year in response to numerous coyote-dog encounters.
“It’s an open space that has been used informally as a dog park — but it is not a dog park,” Le said. “We want everybody to enjoy the open space but we have to come up with a set of rules that everyone can agree to that stops the degradation of the land.”
But Ireland said the challenge now facing Westminster’s land management officials is that “it’s hard to take away something that people have used for that long.”
This isn’t the first time a Front Range community has rallied around the future of an off-leash dog facility. In 2017, hundreds of residents in and around Evergreen fought for months to save the popular 107-acre Elk Meadow Park for untethered dogs.
Jefferson County Open Space officials floated a proposal to limit loose dogs to an 8-acre section of the park but ultimately decided to close the entire park to off-leash use. Elk Meadow saw as many as 400 people and their dogs each day, causing parking headaches and safety hazards for those crossing the road from the parking lot to the park.
Matt Robbins, a spokesman for Jefferson County’s Parks and Conservation Department, said the challenges for land managers were the steep topography of the park and spiking levels of E. coli, caused by dog feces measured in the hundreds of pounds, in an intermittent stream that ran through the property.
But “awful” is how Betsy Rich, an Evergreen resident, described the park’s closure. She led the fight seven years ago to keep Elk Meadow open, and she still disputes the level of contamination the county cited for its shutdown.
“Not only was it a place to exercise your dog, it was the center of the community for so many of us,” she said. “Those were who your friends were.”
Dog owners suggest alternatives
Rich urged Westminster residents to “fight, fight and fight” any attempt to significantly reduce off-leash acreage at Westminster Hills Open Space.
“Hopefully they’ll have better luck than we did,” she said.
Westminster might take a cue on how to move forward from two other large off-leash parks in the Denver area. Chatfield State Park has a 69-acre off-leash dog park and Cherry Creek State Park has 107 acres for unleashed canines. Both charge a $3 daily fee or $25 for an annual pass, and users are limited to three dogs per visit.
Westminster resident Bob Cantrell was walking his two miniature Australian shepherds, Jack and Jill, during the lunch hour Monday. He uses Westminster Hills every day, he said, and could see a middle-of-the-road approach with the property — with the city closing half of the current off-leash area to loose dogs for a year to let it regenerate, then switching to the other half the following year.
Trying to stuff everyone and their dogs onto a tiny parcel would be a bad idea, Cantrell said: “Can you imagine how it would be on 40 acres?”
Such a scale-back also wouldn’t work for Drew Landis of Arvada, who enjoys taking different routes on the network of trails in the park to keep things fresh and interesting — for him and his dog.
He’s been coming to Westminster Hills several times a week for seven years. But if the off-leash area was diminished by 90% or more?
“I’d probably stop coming,” he said.
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