TUCSON (KVOA) – Joan Visconti from Tucson has been coming to North Sixth Avenue Dog Park for years to bond with her 9-year-old service dog, Bhakti.
She said the park has long been a special place with a sense of community.
“We have had a church here for 15 years, I mean a great church, people who have gathered,” said Visconti. “We ran fundraisers for the park itself to improve its soil when it needed work.”
But that feeling has changed, she said, since the city of Tucson updated the dog park with gravel in the summer of 2019.
The park is now semi-gravel in the front and dried out grass in the back.
“It’s getting hot and people are falling. It is dangerous for the dogs if they jump and fall, they get injured, “said Visconti.” They break nails in the gravel that can cause serious problems. You can get infections. ”
Charlene Kerr, another regular customer at the dog park, also has an issue with the gravel and said it clearly keeps people with mobility issues away.
“They put it in so deep that it’s hard to walk on. Even my dogs will walk along the edges on the little cement that’s supposed to hold the gravel, “Kerr said.” I’ve seen a dramatic decrease in the number of elderly people who sometimes have difficulty walking and several people in wheelchairs have stopped walking. “
Visconti said she and a group of others reported their concerns about the gravel to the city’s parking commission before the update went through.
She said they continued to raise their concerns after it was entered.
“Almost two years later and the gravel is still here,” said Visconti. “We told the parking commission that this was against the law and they did nothing.”
She got involved with the Arizona Center for Disability Law, which sent a formal complaint to the city.
ACDL declined our request for an interview, but sent N4T investigators the following statement:
“ACDL has contacted the city to improve the accessibility of urban dog parks and hopes to find a collaborative and affordable solution for everyone who uses dog parks and go one step further to improve the lives of people with disabilities in the community to improve.”
News 4 Tucson went to town and see attorney Mike Rankin for answers. Rankin and a city spokesman declined our request for an interview, but Rankin sent us a letter that the city sent in response to the ACDL.
The letter says the city will work to make its dog parks more accessible to ADA. There are three main steps listed in order to do this.
- Step one is to replace the door handles on North 6th Avenue Dog Park with lever handles.
- Step two is to hire an ADA specialist over the “next few weeks” to oversee all current and future plans for all of the city’s dog parks.
- Step three is that the city will close 6th Avenue Dog Park for “4-6 weeks” while the lawn is restored.
A city spokesman said the city does not admit to breaking ADA laws but wants to go beyond to meet the needs of community members.
Joan Visconti said she was hopeful with what the city contained in the letter, but if the city doesn’t get through in the next few months, she said she would file a federal complaint.
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