Dog days of summer? Not on Gimli boardwalk, beach

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This article was published 11/06/2015 (3743 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Any dog on the beach in Gimli is already an outlaw. Soon, they won’t be welcome on either the nearby grass or the boardwalk.

But expect dog owners to show their bark and their bite to try to make Gimli’s beachfront a puppy place.

A standing-room-only council meeting Wednesday evening saw council vote 3-2 to approve first reading on a bylaw amendment to uphold the beach ban and extend it to the adjacent grassed area and boardwalk by redefining the no-dogs zone to everything past the parking lot.

Mayor Randy Woroniuk said he, deputy mayor Peter Peiluck and Coun. Danny Luprya voted in favour of the ban; opposed were councillors Richard Pegrowski and Thora Palson. But, Woroniuk acknowledged Thursday, there are two more bylaw readings to go.

The next meeting is June 24, when both second and third readings will be voted upon, Woroniuk said.

Woroniuk said he is a dog owner and dog lover, but people needed to be protected from biting and threatening dogs, and the water, sand and grass need to be free of doggy waste. Council voted last winter to put down two dogs who’d bitten someone, and no one wants to go through that, said the mayor.

Woroniuk said no one brought a dog to the council meeting. People leaving the meeting directed “rude remarks” at the councillors favouring the ban, he said.

“I’m hoping we’ll all be adults about this,” Woroniuk said.

Free-the-dogs activist Jason Beck is upset over the council decision, and he expects dog owners will put considerable pressure on council to try to get at least one councillor to reverse their vote. He predicted “dog tourists” and their wallets will stop 15 minutes south at Winnipeg Beach, where they and their dogs are welcome.

“The economy is going to take a hit,” because tourists with dogs will go elsewhere, likely to Winnipeg Beach, said Beck.

“Winnipeg Beach has won the lottery with this.

“I walked in with over 800 names on petitions. We had the names of over 80 business owners” who wanted the dogs allowed on the boardwalk, Beck said.

But Woroniuk said council checked the petitions, and some of the business names were signed by staff not the owners, he said.

And the names on the petition are not all Gimli residents, Woroniuk said: “I’m getting hate mail from Vancouver.”

Beck said he proposed creating an enforcement committee that would police dog owners who let their dogs off-leash or failed to clean up, but the three councillors wouldn’t go for it.

Woroniuk said young people hired as beach patrollers would enforce the regulations. If scofflaws ignore them, they’d call the bylaw officer, who in turn could call the Mounties, said the mayor.

“There were lots of complaints about dogs on the beach, people being bitten, feces on the beach,” Woroniuk said.

Beck reckoned dog owners would obey the law, at least those whose dogs were never a problem in the first place. “Maybe the mayor should be the one standing there and kicking them off the boardwalk,” rather than making summer students police any problems, he said.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca