Dog Wars : Opposing Leash Initiatives Have Hermosa Beach Residents Howling

There is a sun-dappled path not far from the ocean that runs the length of Hermosa Beach, and the community’s canines have had the blissful run of the place for what seems like, well, a dog’s age.

But freedom, like California real estate, has its price, and the city is closing escrow on that promenade for $7.5 million. Plans to enforce the local leash law there have touched off a howl among dog owners that is reverberating all the way to the ballot box.

The dispute has come down to two competing local initiatives--the City Council’s, mandating leashes in the new 20-acre park, and the dog owners’, which bans the leashes. On Tuesday, the city’s 13,407 voters will decide whether to tether its 1,100 best friends.

To owners like Jan Buike, who has a golden retriever named Dune, the greenbelt battle represents a suburban last stand against “that big-city mentality of leashes and cement.”

“It’s the only place in Hermosa Beach where you can let your dogs run free and the only green place around,” she said. “Everything else is covered with condominiums and parking lots.”

Mayor June Williams, however, is fretting that the city will end up with “a $7.5-million dog run.” Let them off the leash, she predicted, and soon every dog in the South Bay will be “nipping at joggers legs and knocking down little kids and going potty in the ice plant.”

The issue--dog space versus people space--has become increasingly familiar in Southern California’s ever-more-crowded metropolitan parks. Last January, special leash-free dog hours were designated in Los Angeles’ rustic Laurel Canyon Park after intense lobbying from pet owners there, and so many pets are romping there that two more “dog exercise areas” are under consideration for the Sepulveda Basin and Griffith Park.

In Santa Monica, the City Council is expected to vote later this month on a cordoned-off dog sector for Memorial Park. In San Diego, dogs have been allowed to play off leash since 1972 on Fiesta Island and on an Ocean Beach jetty known to locals as “doggie beach.’

In tiny Hermosa Beach, where about 20,000 people are packed into a strip of coastline less than a mile and a half square, the controversy has loomed especially large. There are about 1,100 registered dogs, according to Melvin Lee, the city’s field supervisor of animal control, and for years dog owners have gradually been running out of places to exercise their pets. No leash? That’ll be a $58.75 fine. Dog on the beach? The penalty is $235.

Still, some are determined to see Fido range free. Lee once caught an unleashed dog and master trying to hide behind a bush. Another local man violated the leash-law ordinance so many times, Lee said, that his officers were on a first-name basis with not only the owner but the dog. It was not difficult, he acknowledged, “since they were both named Dave.”

But the greenbelt, a 20-acre strip where the Santa Fe Railroad tracks used to be, has traditionally been the one spot where the city’s leash laws have had no clout because the right-of-way belonged to the railroad and was therefore private property. In the burgeoning South Bay, it has been one of the last bits of land where owners have been able to legally unleash their dogs, and people and pets come from throughout the region for a game of fetch-the-stick or a jog down the path.

But in 1987, fearing the railroad would sell the woodsy path to developers, the city’s voters passed a local measure ordering the city to buy it and keep it as open space--a plan similar to that adopted by neighboring Manhattan Beach, which also has a section of the right of way where leash laws are enforced.

The price was $7.5 million, with the city to assume ownership later this year. No one on the council guessed the routine extension of leash laws to the coveted new park would set off such an uproar, Williams said.

“A couple hundred people who owned dogs came down and said they didn’t want us to enforce it,” the mayor said. The group claimed that there had never been problems on the strip. City staff members found that in eight years there had been only one dog bite and two dogs hit by cars. The atmosphere on the greenbelt was so friendly, the staff report added, that two dog owners had met and fallen in love there and “married on New Year’s Eve, 1988.”

Opponents, however, wanted rules to ensure equal access for people without pets--joggers, for example, and folks like Lawrence Burritt, 52, who wrote to complain that during their morning constitutional down the path, he and his wife were “sniffed, jumped on, chased and had to dodge dog piles that cover the whole area.”

Efforts to compromise fell through, and the dog owners began passing petitions under the leadership of 45-year-old Tom Arp, a United Auto Workers community representative and the owner of an elderly poodle. The group named itself WATCHDOG, for We Are the Citizens of Hermosa, Democracy Our Goal, and began demanding not only a leash ban on the greenbelt but also a ban on council plans to pave the parking lot there.

City Council meetings began to get emotional. When the council put its pro-leash measure on the ballot in June, one dog owner burst into the opening bars of “We Shall Overcome.” By summer’s end, Councilman Chuck Sheldon said, he was checking the greenbelt after his Rotary meetings to make sure owners were cleaning up after their dogs.

As Election Day approaches, the two sides remain as tenacious in combat as a pair of pit bull terriers.

“We’re the densest populated community in all the South Bay,” Councilman Jim Rosenberger complained. “For us to have the only off-leash area here for everyone around to use just stands logic on its head.”

But Arp sees a different logic.

“When I see a dog running free, it makes me feel free,” Arp said one recent morning as his pooch trotted delicately down the path. “It makes me feel good inside. It’s the natural way.”