Kingsman Dog Park will open to the public at 5:00 pm this Friday, March 25th. To celebrate, please join us for an informal get-together from 5-7 pm at the new park. We invite everyone to come by, take a look around, play a little fetch and make some new friends from the neighborhood. Members of the Hill Hounds Steering Committee will be there to answer questions about the park and to hand out free treats to your very patient pooches.

Sometime in the next few weeks, we will have a larger event to celebrate the park's opening. At this event we are planning to have representatives from the Department of Health on hand to help people obtain dog licenses and dog park tags. You can also get this information at http://app.doh.dc.gov/form/animal_license.asp.

The park will be open until 10:00 pm on Friday. Starting on Saturday, March 26th, the park will be open from 7:00 am to 10:00 pm every day of the year.

The good news is that Kingsman Dog Park is finished and ready to open to the public. The bad news is that one last DPR-related obstacle must be cleared before the city will cut the ribbon and let us all in to play. The short version is that Hill Hounds signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the city in 2009 making it an official park partner for Kingsman, something that is required by law for the park to open. But, DPR lost the signed agreement. Now, DPR is asking Hill Hounds to sign a new agreement.

The new agreement that DPR has proposed is mostly the same - but is just different enough that we have to go through another round of negotiations with them before we feel comfortable signing it, especially since some of the new clauses ask Hill Hounds to take on additional financial responsibiities. We are working as fast as we can to resolve these questions and are hoping to have a signed agreement by sometime next week.

Hill Hounds will be holding its Annual Meeting on Wednesday, February 16th at 7:30 pm upstairs at SOVA Espresso and Wine on H St NE. Since Kingsman Dog Park is now more than a hope and will be completed soon, this year's meeting will focus mainly on the needs and responsibilities of Hill Hounds going forward, including organizing the committee responsible for opening and closing the park every day, our first work day in the Spring, and the first clinic we will be holding to help folks get official DC dog park tags.

We will also be holding our annual elections to the Hill Hounds Board of Directors and we hope that some of you who are planning on visiting the park regularly think about volunteering for one of the open positions. Board Members steer Hill Hounds' work, volunteering their time to benefit the dogs and dog owners of the neighborhood. If you are interested in the possibility of joining the Board, please send an e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

We are looking forward to seeing many of you at the meeting and getting to know each other at the brand new park!

We are excited to introduce the benches that will be going into Kingsman Field Dog Park. There will be three 6-foot long benches in the park, one in the small dog area and two in the main area. We chose this bench because it has a steel mesh design that should be relatively vandal-proof and it doesn't have slits in which little paws could get trapped. We are currently working with the same company on a design for a shade/rain structure and I hope I can post more information on this shelter soon.

I know that it is hard to tell that we are getting close to having a new dog park by the dirt pit over at Kingsman that hasn't changed since the middle of the summer. But, things are moving behind the scenes. Our contractor was given a demolition permit in July, but the city has been dragging its feet when it comes to issuing a build permit. We thought we had it a few weeks ago, but paperwork delays have been plaguing the process.

UPDATE, 10/13: It turns out that our contact at the Department of Parks and Recreation was premature in telling us recently that the build permit was about to be issued and now she says that there was "an unexpected last minute delay."

We are happy to announce that the Build Permit for Kingsman Field Dog Park has finally been issued by the city and construction can move forward. After obtaining a permit for demolition in July, our construction company has been busy finalizing the design and ordering materials while waiting for the city to give the green light for construction. Look for big changes to the site soon as the park begins to take shape.

Hill Hounds has also been busy ordering amenities for the park, including benches and the engraved bricks that will line the entrance donated by so many of our members. As such, donations of engraved bricks to be placed at the dog park during original construction have closed for now.