POULSBO — Though it’s not exactly Howe Farm, a new off-leash dog area may soon have more tails wagging in Little Norway.

And make both dog owners and non-dog owners smile.

The Poulsbo Parks and Recreation Commission is proposing a 300-foot-by-100-foot area along the entrance to Raab Park become the new off-leash dog area for the park. It does not include an unpaved parking area that is often used by P-Patch and children’s garden participants.

The idea was unanimously proposed by the commission this month and the city council’s Community Services Committee concurred with the idea at its Jan. 12 meeting. Poulsbo Parks and Recreation Director Mary McCluskey said she intends to bring a proposal before the full Poulsbo City Council sometime within the next two months.

The “Bark Park” currently being used in the southwestern corner of Raab is less than half the size of the proposed site. Created by the Parks and Recreation Department in 1998, the area is not an appropriate size for large breeds to run nor for owners to conduct many kinds of off-leash training and play.

Poulsbo resident Mary Carter, who has been using the park since 2000, said she has difficulty playing with her 70-pound standard poodle Rio in the area.

“My dog likes to play ball and it’s hard to play ball there,” she commented. “If you don’t throw the ball just right, it ends up in the blackberry bushes.”

Though wood chips are frequently spread on the ground of Bark Park, Carter added that it is usually muddy in the winter and dusty in the summer.

“It’s hard for the little dogs in the summer because the dust gets in their eyes,” Carter explained. “So it just hasn’t been good for any kind of dog.”

The Kitsap County Humane Society patrols Raab for dogs off-leash outside Bark Park and owners face a warning on their first offense and then a $500 fine. By law, dogs must be on a leash in all parks in Poulsbo.

But some owners still let their dogs off the leash in Raab Park because they feel they cannot use Bark Park. Others allow their dogs to be off leash between the parking lot and the designated area. While the practice may have worked for dog owners, it has been a burden for other users of the park. The Kitsap Community Garden Foundation, which runs the P-Patch program at Raab Park, spearheaded a project in the summer of 2003 to build a fence around the garden. One reason cited for the fence’s necessity was off-leash dogs damaging garden plots.

The idea of creating a space that would better serve dog owners has been on the Poulsbo Parks and Recreation Commission’s agenda for quite some time. Commissioner Phyllis Grenberg, who lives near Raab, is credited with keeping the issue alive long enough to find consensus among parks commission members. The idea was added to the Capital Improvement Project (CIP) list by the city council in late 2004. McCluskey, who worked on the siting of the current Bark Park, said she knew the time would eventually come that the old area would need to be replaced.

“We did a lot of research into what other cities were doing (when we created Bark Park) but we knew when we created it that it wasn’t going to be big enough,” she explained.

Viking Fence recently put in a bid to create the new area. Using some of the current run’s fencing, the cost will be $3,042, which McCluskey is suggesting be paid out of park reserves.

If approved by council, the new Bark Park area will look similar to its current state, including a grass ground cover instead of wood chips. The old area would be absorbed into the general park space after the completion of the new site. Carter said the idea has also elicited enthusiastic responses from all of the dog owners she’s mentioned it to so far.

“It’s going to be great having this clear area for them to run or to throw a ball or a Frisbee,” she commented of the possibility. “It’s a good socialization tool, dogs like to be around one another, so we really need an area to do that.”