PARKS / Dog owners hope to bury parks proposal / Plant restoration may mean more bans, they fear

As the city's Recreation and Park Department considers plans to restore more than two dozen parks with native plants, dog owners are fighting to keep areas open that they fear will be restricted to them.

Naturalists say the plan will create habitats for wildlife and provide a glimpse of how the area looked in the pre-Gold Rush days.

Dog owners are turning out in force at a series of community meetings, writing letters and vowing to defeat the proposal, even though it would not significantly change the city's dog rules.

The public has until July 14 to comment on the Recreation and Park Department's Natural Areas Management Plan, which has been in the works for several years. The plan would protect 31 portions of parks, or in some cases entire parks, representing about 4 percent of the city's total land.

Those areas would be cleared of non-native plants such as ivy, fennel and broom; and about 3,400 trees, or 5 percent of the 64,000 trees on park land.

The trees slated for removal are old or diseased eucalyptus, Monterey pine and Monterey cypress, which are considered hazardous because they might fall, said Recreation Department spokesman Elton Pon. Owls and hawks often nest in healthy eucalyptus, which are not slated for removal.

In some cases natives would be planted in place of the non-natives, but in other cases the natives would be left to grow on their own, which they're likely to do if given relief from weeds, said Jake Sigg, conservationist for the Yerba Buena chapter of the California Native Plant Society.

It's important to restore native plants because "they're part of our natural heritage," said Sigg. "The plants that have evolved here are very distinctive to San Francisco. People need to know what this land was like, and right now there's not much of it left."

The main changes outlined in the plan are the elimination of 25 percent of the department's 40 miles of trails -- mostly short cuts and other informal paths. Sixty percent would be improved, and the rest would be left alone.

For dogs, all six of the city's official off-leash areas -- at Corona Heights, Pine Lake Park, Buena Vista Park, Lake Merced, McLaren Park and Bernal Hill -- will be preserved.

Dogs will be required to be leashed in all other areas, which is not a change from the current rule although it's rarely enforced.

But dogs will be banned altogether from two particularly sensitive areas: Pine Lake and the creek at McLaren Park.

Pine Lake is a bucolic natural lake near Stern Grove, surrounded by trees, shrubs, reeds and blackberry bushes. Ducks, egrets, herons, cormorants, fish, frogs and other wildlife live there.

There have been numerous sightings of western pond turtles, which are rare but not endangered in California. The state Fish and Game Department has deemed the turtle a "species of interest."

The Recreation Department doesn't have the funding to do a conclusive study on whether the western pond turtle lives in Pine Lake, but if it is determined the turtle does live there, then plans for the lake would change significantly. For starters, trees would be cut down, because the western pond turtle likes plenty of sun.

Meanwhile, dog owners who frequent Pine Lake Park, a spacious off-leash area between Pine Lake and Stern Grove, are furious that they might be required to leash their dogs around the lake and keep their pooches out of the water entirely.

They say they clean up after their dogs and most days they are the only ones using the park.

"We're honest, law-abiding, good people, and to be kicked out of here would be a crime," said Shirley Selby, who enjoys the park with her Belgian sheepdog, Sunny. "We love this park. It's our home away from home."

Melinda McMurray, who comes to the park with her poodle Momoko, said that "this park hasn't been native in years. If you look at who's here, it's us. We're here every day, rain or shine. We clean it up, we walk around the lake, we use it all. This really is our park."

The public has until July 14 to comment on the Recreation and Park Department's Natural Areas Management Plan.

The plan is available at branch libraries and on the department's Web site, www.parks.sfgov.org/site/recpark_meeting.asp?id=1896.