The Seattle Parks budget, and the off-leash share of it.
Seattle Parks & Recreation's (SPR) reported budget grew from $168M (2018, operating only) to $507M proposed (2026, all funds). About a quarter of the apparent jump is the 2019 shift from operating-only to all-funds reporting, not real growth. The off-leash area (OLA) line went from $106,000 a year in Park District Cycle 1 to $328,345 in 2023 and about $1.57M in 2025 once Cycle 2 construction money is counted, a figure SPR released in July 2026 in response to a public records request. Roughly a fifth of the Cycle 2 money has actually been spent. These charts put both series on one page with the methodology caveats intact.
The parks budget and the OLA line, on one axis.
Bar = SPR total ($M). Lines = the OLA-related series. Solid orange markers are the OLA-only figures; the dashed orange line is the combined OLA + P-Patch “Maintaining Parks & Facilities” BSL that contains them. A log axis lets the OLA series remain legible alongside the SPR total; a linear version would render the OLA line as a flat sliver on the baseline.
SPR's total budget rose from $168M (2018) to $507M (2026 proposed, all funds). Every OLA series on the same chart sits 2–3 orders of magnitude below it. The OLA-only line runs $106,000 a year in Cycle 1, $328,345 in 2023 and $333,478 in 2024, then steps to about $1.57M in 2025 and 2026 as the Cycle 2 construction money lands inside it. There is no OLA-only figure for 2019–2022: the city reported the joint BSL in those years and the records request that produced the split covers 2023 onward.
At its Cycle 2 peak the OLA line is still under half a percent of SPR spending.
Same series, expressed as a share of SPR's total budget and scaled in basis points (1 bp = 0.01%). Solid bars use the OLA-only Master Project; dashed-outline bars use the combined OLA + P-Patch BSL for 2019–2022, where no OLA-only figure exists. A reference line marks the Cycle 1 level of 6.8 bp (0.068%).
Cycle 1 sits at 6.8 bp (0.068% of SPR spending) in 2016, 6.3 bp by 2018. Cycle 2 is markedly higher: 10.0 bp in 2023, 10.4 in 2024, then 46.2 in 2025 and 31.1 in 2026 as the construction money lands. Even that peak is under half of one percent. The rise is real and it is mostly capital, which is spent once; the 2023–24 operating level of about 10 bp is the recurring figure. For scale, SPR's own 2017 plan puts Seattle's dog population at 150,000, roughly one dog for every four residents at the time, and its 2015 survey of dog owners found 67% of respondents use an OLA weekly to monthly. (Earlier versions of this page said "25% of residents use OLAs"; the survey covered dog owners only, and the sentence was corrected in September 2026.)
Cycle 2 funded off-leash areas. It has not spent the money.
Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) books off-leash areas as Master Project MC-PR-51002 inside the Maintaining Parks & Facilities budget line, and in July 2026 released four years of budget and spending against it. The budget quadrupled in 2025, when the construction money arrived. Spending did not follow: the share of each year's budget actually spent fell from 76% to 21%, and 2026 is running at 5% through 7 July. Across the four years, $1,053,037 of a $5,625,926 revised budget has gone out the door, leaving $4,362,265 unspent.
The unspent balance is the finding, not a comparison with community gardens: the P-Patch Master Project in the same budget line spent 32.0% of its revised budget across the closed years 2023–2025, against 34.2% for off-leash areas. Both underspend at about the same rate. What is distinctive about the off-leash line is the size of the balance and the direction of travel, and that the money involved is construction money for two specific parks. Of it, roughly $600,000 had been spent by July 2026, all on planning and design; SPR estimates construction at West Seattle Stadium and Othello begins in early 2027. The 2026 revised budget of $2,990,479 is nearly double the $1,574,370 adopted, which is what carrying an unspent balance forward looks like.
The other side of the ledger: dog-license revenue vs. OLA spending.
The figures above track what the city spends on off-leash areas. A 2026 public records request (PRR C264029) lets us add what the city collects from dog owners. The two are an order of magnitude apart.
The city collects roughly $1.24M a year in dog-license fees, about four times the $328,345 budgeted for off-leash areas in 2023. Dog-license revenue also dwarfs the ~$24,500/year in off-leash fine revenue on the Enforcement page. The enforcement program is a much larger number, and since July 2026 the site can say what it actually cost: SPR was billed $456,173 in 2024 for three park-patrol officers, on invoices computed from a 40-hour week rather than from hours worked, while the staffing agency reported it could field one and a half to two (Enforcement, cost note; PRR C266465). The 2026 agreement caps the line at $528,279 and bills on actual hours.
Off-leash space per dog, peer cities.
Few major U.S. or Canadian cities publish a dog-park-specific operating line, which makes a dollars-per-dog peer comparison impossible without public records requests to each parks department. What every city does publish is OLA acreage. Divided by an estimated dog population (city population × 0.30 dogs/person, AVMA-derived), that yields square feet of dedicated off-leash space per dog.
A Seattle dog has about 5.5 sq ft of legal off-leash space at the cross-city 0.30 dogs/resident rate, roughly the footprint of a doormat. Portland sits at ~19, San Francisco ~20, Vancouver BC ~37; Austin's fenced-comparable figure (~11) is about twice Seattle's. Because peer cities use wider definitions of off-leash space than Seattle does, these bars likely understate the gap. (The 5.4 sq ft figure elsewhere on the site is the same calculation via a more granular AVMA-by-household derivation; the gap is rounding against two equivalent denominators.) Per-OLA detail is in Part II — Access.
Dedicated facilities: playgrounds for children, OLAs for dogs.
A different scaling: the count of dedicated facilities per user. Seattle has 157 playgrounds (Trust for Public Land [TPL] 2025 ParkScore, includes joint-use schoolyards) for roughly 115,000 residents under 18. It has 14 fenced OLAs for at least 150,000 dogs (Seattle Humane / Cascade PBS conservative floor; SPR's 2023 Expansion Study cites estimates up to 400,000), so dogs outnumber children under 18 roughly 1.3 to 1.
At the 150,000 dog floor, Seattle has one dedicated off-leash area per ~10,700 dogs and one playground per ~733 kids, a ratio roughly 14.6× higher for dogs. Using the higher 400,000 estimate from SPR's 2023 Expansion Study, the ratio widens to about 39×. Per-OLA acreage and site sizes are charted in Part II — Access; the full opening-year sequence is in Part I — The Gap.
Cycle 1 vs. Cycle 2, and the backlog neither one touches.
The Seattle Park District runs in six-year cycles. Cycle 1 (2015–2020) funded OLA operations at about $106,000 a year, and built nothing. Cycle 2 (2023–2028) is a different order of magnitude: $3,805,011 appropriated to the OLA Master Project across 2023–2026, including construction money for West Seattle Stadium and Othello. The comparison can now be made on money actually spent rather than money voted. Cycle 1 spent $635,000 on OLA major maintenance across 2017–2021, about $127,000 a year. Cycle 2 spent $902,443 across the three closed years 2023–2025, about $301,000 a year, and $1,053,037 in total through 7 July 2026. Note the scope gap: the Cycle 1 figure is major maintenance, the Cycle 2 figure is the whole Master Project including design work, so the comparison runs in Cycle 2's favour and the real ratio is smaller than 2.4×.
SPR's 2026 capital program across all projects is $87.7M; the OLA construction line is about 3.5% of that. SPR's project pages give that line as $3,103,000 for West Seattle Stadium and Othello. Ravenna Park was selected for design only, and its construction is unfunded: it would need a future appropriation (Parkways). Of the construction money, roughly $600,000 had been spent by July 2026, all of it on planning and design; SPR estimates construction begins in early 2027.
The backlog the capital line doesn't touch. SPR's own 2016 capital-priority list, released in July 2026 (PRR C266465, Bates 00168), itemized $1,150,000–$2,220,000 of deferred capital work across the 14 existing OLAs in 2016 dollars, against Park District OLA maintenance the plan states as $103,000–$117,000 a year: an 11-to-22-year backlog at 2016 prices, before inflation. SPR told Council it spent about $635,000 on OLA major maintenance over 2017–2021 (Bates 00681). The Cycle 2 capital builds two new sites; it does not address the list.
Sources, methodology and caveats for this page: Data & Methods.