Memorial marker prompts policy reminder
Last month, former La Cañada resident Scotti Strockis drove with her children to an outdoor spot near their old house on Chula Senda Lane for a memorial service for the family dog, Dodger, who died in June at age 15.
The trio held a ceremony and marked the occasion by placing a small remembrance stone by a rock and some shrubs located near the head of the Georgian Spur Trail, a place Dodger had loved dearly in his prime.
The stone bore an etching of a West Highland White terrier with a tribute underneath: “DODGER/ Best Dog Ever/ 2001-2016.”
“He was just a great dog and part of the family, a fierce little terrier with a heart of gold,” Strockis recalled in an interview. “When he passed I thought, I’ll put [a memorial] in his happy place.”
The stone, and the sentiment, remained untouched until last Thursday, when a hiker chanced upon it and contacted the La Cañada Flintridge Trails Council.
For more than four decades, the nonprofit Trails Council has worked with city officials to build and maintain La Cañada’s trails system. The maintenance and planning of that system is guided by a trails master plan, part of the city’s own general plan, which stipulates what can and cannot occur on or near those trails.
Complicating matters further is the fact that some of the land on which the paths are laid belong to the County of Los Angeles and fall under the jurisdiction of its Parks and Recreation Department, according to current Flintridge Trails Council President Caroline Craven.
“I like the sentiment, but we follow the trails master plan for a reason,” Craven said Friday. “If everybody put up a marker, our trails would not be a connection to open space.”
When Craven was contacted about the memorial to Dodger, she went to Facebook to reach its owners and let them know it had to be removed. Community members immediately weighed in with a series of comments expressing their desire to let the memorial stand or ask city officials to designate a public space for such symbols of recognition.
This isn’t the first time the relative controversy of citizen-installed markers on public trails has come to light. In 2013, some residents responded after a local Boy Scout troop placed plaques recognizing the completion of an Eagle Scout renovation project near a trail.
At the time, members of La Cañada’s Parks and Recreation Commission said they’d look into creating a centralized location for recognition plaques.
“There was a concern there would be too many plaques going in on horse trails,” Commission Chair Jeff Olson recalled. “The fear was it might take on a life of its own.”
Arabo Parseghian, city liaison to the Parks and Recreation Commission, said that discussion led to the creation in January 2014 of a Recognition Plaque Policy that allows people to apply for plaques recognizing “significant” community service projects consisting of 400 or more person hours at a single project site.
Purchased at the cost of the applicant, plaques would be displayed at the Winery Canyon Park at Foothill Boulevard and Indiana Avenue, the policy stipulates. Since the process was established, however, no one has yet applied for a plaque, Parseghian confirmed Tuesday.
Olson said any residents wanting to broach the subject of widening the plaque policy to include remembrances were welcome to address the Commission at its next meeting.
As for Strockis — who ultimately asked a neighbor to move Dodger’s stone a few feet away onto her own private property — the matter went way beyond her initial intention.
“If I knew this was going to be controversial, I don’t know if I would have done it,” she said.
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Sara Cardine, sara.cardine@latimes.com
Twitter: @SaraCardine
