Dog Parks in Chittenden County: We Looked for the Bag Station in All 69

Here's the whole article in one line, in case you're reading this on your phone with a leash in the other hand: bring your own bag.

We went looking for dog-waste stations in every park in Chittenden County we could find. We found 69 parks across 17 of the county's 18 towns. Exactly four have a bag station that a primary source will actually vouch for. Not four percent — four parks.

That number is the finding, not a failure to find. And getting to it turned up a stranger fact underneath: in 31 of those 69 parks — 45% — the rules don't come from the town you're standing in.

See the full sortable table of all 69 parks →

The park you're in is often not the town you're in

This is the column every dog-park listicle leaves out, and it's the one that changes what you're allowed to do.

Walk into Ethan Allen Homestead. You're in Burlington. You are not governed by Burlington's ordinance — you're governed by the Winooski Valley Park District, which runs 13 of the county's parks across several towns. UVM's natural areas account for another 7. Vermont State Parks, 4. Then there's Vermont Fish & Wildlife, the Jericho Underhill Park District, Audubon Vermont, a ski resort, and one dog park sitting on state-owned land that a city operates.

The sharpest example is a twenty-foot walk. Colchester Bog sits inside Airport Park. Airport Park is the town's, and it allows dogs under voice control. The Bog is UVM's, and its page says: "Sorry, no pets allowed." Same parking lot. Opposite rule. Nothing on the ground tells you where the line is.

So when you look up "is this park dog-friendly," the question you actually need answered is whose park is it? — and almost nobody publishes that next to the park name. We did.

The Burlington ordinance says one thing. The department says another. Both are sort of wrong.

Our own dog-laws research said Burlington's code designates off-leash areas at Starr Farm, Oakledge, Urban Reserve, and Intervale. The Parks department's pages say Waterfront Dog Park, Starr Farm Dog Park, and Texaco Beach. Two lists, barely overlapping. We went to the primary sources to settle it, and the answer is more interesting than either list:

1. The section everyone cites names no parks at all. BCO Sec. 5-14 just says a dog isn't at-large if it's "in a designated off-leash dog area managed and regulated by the board of parks and recreation commissioners." It delegates. Our own attribution of a park list to 5-14 was wrong.
2. The real list is in Appendix D §7(A), and it names five, not four: Starr Farm, Schmanska Park, Oakledge, Urban Reserve, Intervale. Schmanska was missing from our research entirely.
3. "Waterfront Dog Park" and "Urban Reserve" are the same place. The department's own GIS asset registry contains exactly two dog parks: DOG-01 Starr Farm Dog Park and DOG-02 Urban Reserve Dog Park. The public page uses the marketing name; the asset registry uses the ordinance name.
4. "Texaco Beach" is already inside the Urban Reserve. Appendix D bounds that area "on the south by the land known as the Texaco Jetty — including so much land to the south of the Jetty as to allow for access to the beach directly adjacent to the Jetty." The department names the beach separately because it's the city's only dog-permitted beach.
5. And the codified list is an expired pilot. Appendix D §7(F)(1) says these rules "shall be in full force and effect for eighteen (18) months... [and] shall expire upon the end of the 18th month." The citation line reads (Res. of 4-17-00; Ord. of 9-23-02). The off-leash list in Burlington's code is a roughly 2000–2002 pilot program that nobody ever rewrote.

So the conflict was mostly illusory: the department operates two of the five codified areas, plus the Texaco shoreline the ordinance already folds into one of them. Oakledge, Schmanska, and Intervale are still in the code and absent from the department's asset registry. Whether they sunset, were closed by the director, or are simply unadvertised is not answerable from a web browser. It's a phone call, and it's on our gaps list.

One correction that fell out of this, on ourselves: Appendix D §7(C)(7) requires anyone in a Burlington off-leash area to "carry equipment for removing such feces." Our ordinance dataset lists Burlington as not having a carry-a-bag rule. In off-leash areas, that's wrong.

The four parks with a bag station

• Indian Brook Park (Essex) — "At each trail head we have provided dog mitts and trash receptacles."
• Mills Riverside Park (Jericho) — "The park offers three dispensers of dog waste bags and disposal bins." Three, per the operator. Listings say four; we follow the operator and we don't average. Also worth knowing: the off-leash area there is unfenced, and the Jericho Underhill Park District is emphatic — "Our off-leash area is still NOT a dog park."
• Volunteer's Green and Brown's Court (Richmond).

Richmond is the only town in the county that documents how it pays for them, and the answer is lovely. Its Town Report says the dog-license fee "covers the cost of the doggie poo bag stations at the park and their supplies" — and then names the volunteers who refill them: Rod West at Volunteer's Green, Linda Parent at Brown's Court. Confirmed across five consecutive annual reports. The best-documented waste-station program in Chittenden County runs on license fees and two neighbors.

Meanwhile, Burlington's Parks department publishes public GIS layers for Bathrooms, Public Grills, Playgrounds, Little Free Library, Park Lighting, Beaches, Docks, and Dugouts. There is no layer for dog waste stations. The city can tell you where to borrow a paperback but not where to get a bag.

Why we won't tell you a park has no station

Our data has three values for the waste-station question — confirmed, claimed-unverified, not-documented — and deliberately no "none."

That's not hedging, it's arithmetic. No town on earth publishes an inventory of the stations it doesn't have. So from a desk, "we couldn't find one" and "there isn't one" are literally the same sentence, and they are very much not the same fact. not-documented is a statement about our sources, not about the park. Sixty-three parks are in that bucket. A lot of them probably do have a barrel and a dispenser. "Probably" is not a citation, and we don't publish "probably" as fact.

The aggregators will happily tell you otherwise, because guessing is free. Ours is the version where the empty cells stay empty until somebody actually looks.

Things we didn't expect to find

Off-leash is much bigger than the fenced dog parks. There are only five fenced dog parks in the county — but Saxon Hill Forest (Essex) is off-leash by ordinance, East Woods (UVM, in South Burlington) allows off-leash "under strict voice command," and Preston Pond (Bolton) is voice-control by policy. That's more acreage than every fenced park in the county combined.

The county's only off-leash swim area is at Niquette Bay State Park. "Pets may swim off-leash at the Calm Cove area" — while being banned from the sand beach a short walk away. We have not found this anywhere else.

The seasonal rules are genuinely odd. Shelburne Village Dog Park closes for the growing season, because it shares land with a working farm. Burlington's Oakledge off-leash area is codified as October 1 to April 1 only — off-leash in the off-season. Schmanska is overnight-only. Camel's Hump wants a leash above the tree line. Maple Shade says leash up during hunting season. Three state parks are closed outright for half the year.

Some parks ban dogs entirely — not leashed, banned: Catamount Community Forest (Williston), Charlotte Park & Wildlife Refuge ("even on a leash"), Colchester Bog, the Shelburne and Charlotte town beach facilities, and every Burlington public swimming beach except Texaco.

And St. George has no park at all. No town park, no rec board, no parks department — we checked the town's site through. St. George also has one of the county's strictest scoop laws: you must physically carry a bag whenever your dog is off your property. The strictest rule in the county, and nowhere town-owned to walk your dog.

The 41 phone calls

Forty-one of our 69 rows carry a question the internet cannot answer. Does Winooski's West Allen Street dog park have a dispenser? Williston's Conservation Commission voted "in favor of incorporating dog waste bag dispensers" in 2010 — were they ever installed? Is Essex Junction's dog park fenced? (The posted rules are an unreadable JPEG.) They're all listed on the data page, each with the department to call, because we'd rather publish the gap than paper over it.

The honest ceiling here is that this is a desk survey. We can prove a station exists when someone publishes it; we can never prove one doesn't. The real fix is a field survey — drive to each park, photograph the station or its absence, date it. That's a tank of gas and a Saturday, which is exactly why no aggregator will ever have it. We pick up dog poop in these towns for a living. We drive past most of these parks anyway.

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Until then: the bag stations aren't coming, the rules change between the parking lot and the trailhead, and 63 out of 69 parks won't promise you anything. Bring your own bag. And if the yard is the part you're losing to — that's the bit Scoop There It Is takes off your plate.

More local dog data: every park in the county, sortable · the town-by-town dog laws · how many dogs actually live here.

Notes & sources

• Every park was checked against its operator's primary source — municipal codes, Parks & Rec pages, the Burlington BPRW GIS asset registry, Winooski Valley Park District, Vermont State Parks, UVM Natural Areas, and town annual reports. Third-party listing sites are recorded as leads to verify, never as citations.
• Town names match our dog-laws dataset exactly. Essex town and Essex Junction have been separate jurisdictions since 2022.
• Five town ordinances (Richmond, Jericho, Bolton, Hinesburg, Westford) are scanned images with no text layer, so their leash rules can't be read from the web at all. Richmond's current Municipal Park Ordinance contains no instance of the word "leash" — a widely-repeated leash quote attributed to the town appears to be fabricated, so we don't repeat it.
• Where we couldn't verify something, it's a gap, and the gap is published. We don't fabricate figures.