EXPANSION UPDATE

Big thanks to all our friends and contributors for your continued support! You are what makes the Portsmouth Dog Park so special.

As you may be aware, in the wake of the COVID crisis many construction projects ran into all sorts challenges--- supply chain issues, labor shortages, and sky-rocketing costs of labor and materials. The PDP Expansion Project is no exception. Only two bids were submitted last fall and both were more than twice as much as our original estimates. The PDP Committee, in consultation with the team at Narragansett Engineering and Town of Portsmouth, decided to suspend the project for 18 months, in hopes buying more time for the construction market cool down and giving the planning team a chance explore more affordable options. Thank you for your patience while we go through this process.

To fully realize our dream for expanding the park, we will need all hands on deck! To learn more about how you can help, click here:

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ALL ABOUT OUR EXPANSION PROJECT

Thanks to you, the Portsmouth Dog Park is a huge success! It’s so popular that we are launching an Expansion Project to double the size of the park footprint, increase parking, and add lighting to provide access from sundown to 9:00pm in the winter months. The Feasibility Study, conducted by Narragansett Engineering Inc., was generously funded by the van Beuren Charitable Foundation and Narragansett Engineering.

A senior from the Mathematics Department of Salve Regina University contributed his time and training to creating a park attendance data analysis. See his final report here:

Students from the University of Rhode Island’s Landscape Architecture department, as part of their fall class project under the direction of Department Chair, Professor Richard Sheridan, created landscaping plans for the trail expansion. See their designs here:

HERE'S THE PLAN!

The Park Expansion Plan calls for doubling the size of the Dog Park footprint in the form of a dog-leg (no pun intended!) to the north and west of the existing park. While the main park is open field, the new section will carve a six-foot wide path through the underbrush, allowing native trees and plants to thrive. This will offer dog owners an area to walk with their dogs off leash in a fenced, trail-like setting, something they are unable to do in the Melville trails and Portsmouth parks.
Night Lighting with LED lights will be installed around the small dog area, the eastern end of the large dog area, the agility area, and the parking lot. Lighting the entire park would be cost prohibitive; however, this layout will provide enough illumination for owners keep track of their dogs between sunset and 9:00pm in the winter months.
The plan for the Parking Lot expansion, co-funded by the van Beuren Charitable Foundation and the Town of Portsmouth, will expand the parking area to the north and west into the eastern end of the exiting dog park. This will increase capacity from 10 parking spaces to 30 spaces, and eliminate on-street parking along Smith Street.
Funds permitting, we would like to add these amenities:
- Agility Area inside the large dog park
- Memorial (secret) Garden off the new trail.
- Fencing for a “Time Out” spot in a small section of the large dog area

Thank you to the van Beuren Charitable Foundation, Narragansett Engineering, Salve Regina University, the University of Rhode Island and the Town of Portsmouth for generously supporting this community project.