What's changed on this site.

Five headline figures corrected, two records releases ingested, and every page cut to its finding

The budget correction is the largest. Since 2019 this site said the off-leash area (OLA) share of the “Maintaining Parks & Facilities” budget line was not published and could not be known. That was an inference from the published budget books, and it was wrong. Asked directly, Seattle Parks answered in July 2026: off-leash areas and P-Patch community gardens are two separate Master Projects inside that line, budgeted and spent apart, with no allocation formula because nothing is allocated (PRR C264837).

This site had carried $126,000 (2023) and $129,000 (2024) as the OLA-only budget, attributed to blog and press coverage. No source for those figures was ever located, and the record puts them 2.6 times higher: $328,345 and $333,478, rising to about $1.57M in 2025 and 2026 as Cycle 2 construction money lands inside the same line. Cycle 1 is restated from a round $100,000 to the $106,000 costed in SPR's own 2017 plan. The Cycle 2 capital had been shown as an amount stacked on top of the budget line; it is booked inside it, so showing both double-counted it. A $3.46M capital figure whose cited source does not contain it is gone, replaced by the $3,103,000 on SPR's project pages.

The new finding is what happened to the money. Against a revised budget of $5,625,926 across 2023 to 7 July 2026, the off-leash line has spent $1,053,037, about 18.7%, leaving $4,362,265 unspent. The pattern matters more than the total: 76% of the year's budget was spent in 2023, 50% in 2024, then 21% in 2025, the year the construction money arrived and quadrupled the budget. Of roughly $3.1M for West Seattle Stadium and Othello, about $600,000 has gone out, all planning and design; SPR now estimates construction begins in early 2027. Two cautions the page states as well: 2026 is a partial year, and P-Patch underspends at almost the same rate, so this is not a claim that off-leash projects are uniquely badly run. The budget share of SPR spending, which this site had described as peaking at 0.064% in 2016, in fact reaches 0.462% in 2025; the opinion page argued from the old figure and has been corrected, though the correction cuts against its argument.

A second full-site audit found three more headline claims wrong. The OLA gap is thirteen years, not seventeen. SPR's own 2017 People, Dogs & Parks Plan dates the last openings to 2012–13 (Denny, Magnolia Manor, Kinnear) and gives a 2010 count of 11, not 14; seattle-olas.csv now carries the plan's years and a year_permanent column. The two funded OLAs will not open in 2026. SPR's project pages, archived in the repo, put Othello at fall 2027 and West Seattle Stadium at winter 2028; neither is under construction. The City did spend the three-officer money. Ledger records show SPR was billed $456,173 in 2024 for three Animal Control Officers on calendar-derived invoices while one to two were fielded; earlier entries here saying spend had not tripled were wrong and are annotated.

The enforcement page now separates the 7,015 records into 3,151 citations and 3,191 verbal warnings; actual citations fell 95% from 2018 to 2024, and the cost per actual citation reached about $21,700. Its cost model uses the billed amounts for 2023–24 and drops the maintenance-worker pairing SPR's memo says was vacant from 2023. A new section records that neither SPR nor the Animal Shelter, asked directly (PRRs C266465 and C266744), holds any evaluation of whether the program works, and that SPR's own 2024 review recommended cutting it. Part II fixes the ZIP fair-share ranking and the amenity counts; Part III and Peer Cities carry dated caveats and one correction (San Francisco does license dogs). The opinion page is cut by about a third and corrected on five points.

The site also got shorter and gained a page. Data & Methods now holds the primary-data list, the methodology, and every page's data notes, which had been making the report pages long enough to discourage reading. Each report page ends in a one-line link to its section of it, and old #data-notes anchors still resolve. Elsewhere: plain-language headings replace “Finding 0N,” duplicated material has one home, fee revenue is counted on off-leash violations only ($294,885), and the site's verifier gained guards for opening years, the 2010 baseline, planned-site status, the citation/warning split, and every figure in this entry.

→ budget.html · funded but not spent · budget.html · the OLA line · enforcement.html · no evaluation exists · data-methods.html · budget notes

A full-site accuracy pass: every load-bearing number re-checked against its source

A site-wide review traced every load-bearing number back to its primary source, corrected a handful of stale figures, and expanded the automated verifier that keeps them from creeping back. Most changes were small. Three are worth flagging.

The illegal-off-leash-use figure from Seattle Parks’ owner survey is now blended across the three settings the survey actually reports (39% in local parks and 38% in large parks weekly to monthly, and 36% on trails) to about 38%, replacing the single 39% shown before. The survey is correctly dated 2015, not 2016, and its source, the 2017 People, Dogs and Parks Strategic Plan, is now committed to the repository and quoted from the page it supports.

Part III’s Magnuson case study has been reframed. The volunteer group that stewarded the park for two decades (MOLG) has gone dormant and its website is dead, so the section now describes it in the past tense as a site-specific model, and centers current stewardship on COLA, the still-active nonprofit that partners with Seattle Parks across the system.

→ part2-access.html · Finding 05 · part3.html · Magnuson

2026 staffing agreement received: same three-officer plan, re-priced; the “expansion” is delayed hiring, not new scope

A new records request (C265589) returned the 2026 Seattle Parks & Recreation (SPR) / Seattle Animal Shelter Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) and the City's 2023 Adopted / 2024 Endorsed budget book. The 2026 agreement re-prices the same three-Animal-Control-Officer program funded back in 2023: wage growth lifts the per-officer cost from $151,551 to $176,093, and the Finance & Administrative Services (FAS)-side maximum from $454,652 to $528,279/year. The headcount ceiling did not change; the price did.

This reframes the April 2026 “more paw patrols” coverage. Funding for up to three officers has existed since 2023, but the positions sat largely vacant. As of April 2026 SPR said two of the three were still being filled, with one officer working parks. So the increase now underway is the 2023 plan being executed (and re-priced for wages), not a new budget expansion. (Correction, September 2026: this entry originally said the city's actual spend had not tripled. Ledger records released in July 2026 show SPR was billed for three officers from 2023 on flat, calendar-derived invoices, $456,173 in 2024; billed spend did triple, deployment did not. See the September 2026 entry.) One structural change: the 2026 MOA pairs each officer with an existing Park Ranger rather than a Facilities Maintenance Worker, but neither is sworn police, so the “can't compel an ID” limit is unchanged.

→ enforcement.html · Finding 02 · opinion.html · O1

Current ACO staffing agreement received: the park-patrol program's funded headcount tripled in 2023, and the enforcement itself can't compel an ID

A records request (C265341) returned the current signed Seattle Parks & Recreation (SPR) / Seattle Animal Shelter Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) and the city's 2022 report to Council behind it. The agreement shows the park-patrol program was expanded earlier than the April 2026 headlines suggested: in 2023 the Seattle Park District Board funded two additional Animal Control Officers (ACOs), taking the program from one officer to three, a billed $454,652/year (the Finance & Administrative Services (FAS) side), on a seven-day schedule, with traceable budget codes, running through 2027. The per-officer cost is essentially unchanged ($152,399 → $151,551); the city simply now buys three.

The 2022 report also documents a structural limit the records make explicit for the first time: Animal Control Officers are not police. They cannot compel identification from an owner who refuses, and cannot detain; Seattle Police "recently… have been unable to assist," so officers "issue verbal warnings on all first contacts." Residents have learned this and share patrol locations online. It is a city-documented mechanism for how citation output can fall while patrols continue, now noted on the Enforcement page.

This response fulfills the previously-pending staffing records request (#7). The cost-per-citation chart deliberately keeps its officer denominator conservative, because parks patrols are a minority of these officers' duties, with the reasoning set out in the page's cost footnote.

→ enforcement.html · Finding 02 · opinion.html · O1

Find-It-Fix-It complaint records received: residents report far more than the city cites

A records request (C263990) returned every “Nuisance Dogs in a Park” complaint filed through the city's Find It Fix It app, April 2024–June 2026 (the complaint category was created in 2024). Residents filed about 3,010 in 2025, the first full year, roughly 11 for every off-leash citation the city issued. Month to month, complaints and citations move independently: complaints rose while citations fell, then citations went nearly silent after mid-2025. A new Enforcement finding sets the two side by side.

The complaint figure also replaces an earlier partial-year 2024 secondary figure on the Access page.

→ enforcement.html · Finding 07

Dog-license records received: most Seattle dogs are unlicensed, and the share is falling

The Seattle Animal Shelter released 2014–2025 dog-license counts and revenue (C264029). Annual licenses issued fell about 21% (24,309 → 19,219). About 26,650 dogs hold a current license, only an estimated 7–18% of the 150,000–400,000 dog-population range. Asked directly, SAS holds no compliance estimate or internal dog-population figure of its own.

New material: a licensing/compliance finding on The Gap; a license-revenue-vs-OLA-spending contrast on Budget (the city collects ~$1.24M/yr in dog licenses against a disclosed ~$100,000–129,000/yr off-leash area (OLA)-only operating budget, which are different departments and read as scale); and a note reinforcing the Access deficit map.

→ part1-the-gap.html · budget.html

More citation data received; enforcement page updated

A new public records request (C263949) extended Seattle's off-leash citation record through April 2026. Combined with the earlier data, the enforcement page now covers a continuous 2014–2026 record and was restructured to lead with the fiscal picture: cost per citation, output over time, the first-offense mix, and geography.

Two things stand out: citation output peaked in 2018 (1,276) and has not recovered, with the strongest year since being 2024 (447), about a third of peak. The program's cost per published citation (its annual cost divided by citations issued, not the price of writing one ticket) has risen even as output fell. First-time offenders remain 84–96% of citations in every year of the record.

Where 2019 appears in both requests, the fuller C263949 record is used. Every figure on the page is reproducible from committed scripts and checked by a verification harness that now also greps the published prose against the data.

→ enforcement.html · Finding 01

First complete public release

Eight-page public-data reference on Seattle's off-leash area (OLA) system: overview, Part I (The Gap), Part II (Access), Part III (Forward), Enforcement, Budget, Peer Cities, and the signed Opinion editorial. Every factual claim links back to its source; the underlying dataset pipeline is reproducible from committed scripts.

Network walkshed methodology landed as part of v1.0. The earlier ~33% straight-line walkshed estimate was replaced with a proper network-distance analysis: 11.7% of Seattle residents are within a 10-minute walking path of an OLA (76.6% within Seattle Parks & Recreation's [SPR] 2.5-mile standard). Computed via compute_walkshed.py (osmnx against Seattle's OSM walk network) and population_coverage.py (2020 Census block-group overlay).

Enforcement page shipped with the full PRR C049204 dataset (4,803 citations, 2014–2019), hotspot map, walkshed-overlap analysis, top-20 table, offense-mix breakdown, and revenue-vs-cost chart against the 2021 Memorandum of Agreement (MOA)'s documented $152,399/yr Animal Control Officer II (ACO II) cost.

Peer Cities page shipped with detail sections on Portland, San Francisco, Vancouver BC, Washington DC, Minneapolis, NYC, Austin, and Boise.

→ index.html · full v1.0 details in the CHANGELOG