Met yesterday with Mary, Gina, and Heidi's husband Allen regarding the dog park. Had a great discussion, got lots of suggestions and even discussed some of our dogs' "issues." It's fun talking to people when you have a common interest. Makes you "come alive."

We discussed the proposed Kirkwood dog park that never got off the ground thanks to the city. Just like Chesterfield, a dog park was not high on their list of priorities. Allen was nice enough to give me a copy of their proposal, which included a specifications and construction budget, and operations and maintenance budget. It's expensive to build and maintain a dog park!

Some suggestions were to:

1) Call a private dog park owner off of Winghaven to see how he got things started and also to find out how well he is doing membership-wise.
2) Call SCORE (Service Core of Retired Executives) or Small Business Administration to see if they can help me get together a business plan.
3) Set up an email account and get the word out about the proposed dog park with some sort of simple questionnaire to get a sense of the number of people who would be interested. It was mentioned that this obviously would not be an exact amount since people would say they were interested and not necessarily join, but at least I could get some idea.
4) Go to the Maryland Heights dog park to check out their granite dust surface (versus grass).

After the meeting I went to the car wash. A man there had his dog with him and the guy at the cash register was giving the dog treats. While petting his dog and waiting for our cars, I told the man I had just come from a meeting about opening a dog park in Chesterfield. He said, "Yeah, it's amazing how there is no recession when it comes to people's dogs. People will take their dogs to the vet before they'll go to their own doctor." He said, "Have you been to a PetsMart on a Saturday? It's crazy!"

So that was encouraging because I do worry about that. Will people pay to go to a dog park while we're in a recession?