City Council Member Joe Carlucci held a community meeting to discuss new parks planned for District 5, including “Central Bark.”
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Four new parks are planned for Jacksonville’s Southbank and San Marco areas. City Councilman Joe Carlucci held a community meeting Thursday night to discuss the plans and answer questions.
The plans include the new Central Bark Dog Park off Broadcast Place near the JEA substation and RiversEdge. Carlucci said there is nothing like this in District 5.
“To my knowledge, there’s not one, but it’s a very, very, highly requested thing, and especially again in those urban areas, people have dogs and they’re in apartments or they’re in condos; they don’t have yards,” Carlucci explained.
One park is planned for under the I-95 overpass off Broadcast Pl., and another next to the Fuller Warren Bridge. Carlucci said the construction process for these projects should be fairly straightforward.
“Luckily for two of the, well, three out of the four, were already kind of blank spaces. So those are pretty, I don’t want to say turnkey, but there’s not a lot of demo that has to be done. It’s just a blank slate,” Carlucci said.
Louise Baron walks her dog often along the Southbank Riverwalk. She says she would welcome a place for her dog to run around.
“This little guy likes to run and play and she likes to play with other people. She misses that, and she doesn’t want to be on a leash all the time,” Baron said.
As far as funding for these projects, Carlucci said the money is already in the city’s capital improvement plans for the next few years. These parks are in the very early planning stages, and no official designs have been created yet. There is no construction timeline yet, but Carlucci expects all four to be finished by the end of 2030.