Turtle Creek Dog Park, and Turtle Creek. Photo from the Turtle Creek Dog Park Facebook page
LEWISBURG – A popular Valley dog park is looking for help in order to re-open. The Turtle Creek Dog Park in Lewisburg was closed due to lack of funding. President of the park association, Larry Winans, explains there is a need for donations to help finance the park. Even though Turtle Creek Park has been closed, the park is maintained through the help of community members joining together on work days in the park.
He said, “A concern I had is if we didn’t take care of the park it was going to get too overgrown too quickly. So we’ve been given permission, we’ve had several work days. Just to give you an example, we had a Sunday work day about a month ago where we were going to do maintenance for the park but it was raining. I was just crushed because I thought John from West Branch Rental gave us equipment to borrow and I thought no one was going to be there. I showed up a half an hour early and there were already five people there. We worked throughout the day and more than 22 people showed up to volunteer time.”
The amount of money needed to reopen the park and cover all expenses is approximately $25,000. Winans gave a breakdown of the association’s budget, “One of the things I didn’t realize when we made an effort to reopen the park is the expenses involved. When you get down to the nuts and bolts, there are a lot of expenses. We need insurance, we need to pay the property taxes, we need the maintenance.”
“We can’t just count on volunteers to mow and trim bushes. So, we’ve tried to contract with some mowing companies in addition to our volunteer days. We have a lot of ideas for improvements. We need to have all of these little things that when you add them up it adds up to a fair amount of money,” he said. You can donate to the Turtle Creek Park Association by visiting www.csgiving.org under designated community impact funds. (Alex Reichenbach)
