The United States of America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. The Washington, D.C., area is the most affluent region in the U.S., and the Village of Chevy Chase, Maryland, is the wealthiest municipality in the region. Importantly, this is not the lesser Chevy Chases such as the Town of Chevy Chase or Chevy Chase Section 5.
Chevy Chase Village Hall is usually home to lively but cordial village government meetings. The civic engagement of Chevy Chase residents lies at the extreme ends of the distribution.
Ambassadors, lobbyists, former state officials, and some of the nation’s most prominent attorneys dwell in this village. Such an elite polity yields a very active and connected municipality.
But on Sept. 9, Village Hall was more than active. It was positively rambunctious, with yelling, disruptions, and a mass walkout.
What pressing matter brought out the passion of the noble citizens of Chevy Chase?
A dog park where the dogs barked.
The Village of Chevy Chase, which sidles against Northwest D.C. and has a median home value of $1.5 million, purchased a small triangle of land from Maryland back in the 1980s. The little parcel was undeveloped, but it was a popular place to walk dogs. So in 2018, the Village board, chaired by Elissa Leonard, wife of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, voted unanimously to spend more than $15,000 to convert the muddy lot into a fenced dog park.
It was yet another meeting ground where neighbor could get to know neighbor and Chevy Chase could deepen its reservoirs of social trust.
But it was the dogs who soon made enemies. Neighbors, many of whom were lawyers, of course, soon objected to the noise. “NO EXCESSIVE BARKING” signs went up. The village elders were lobbied heavily — surely by some professional lobbyists — to shut down this infernal racket. The dog owners, wielding their exceptional social capital, banded together to save the dog bark.
Maryland’s former attorney general, Doug Gansler, was among the doggie backers. The Washington Post ran an article that brought the story onto the national stage, and in the process outed Gansler’s pup as a sexual predator. After the Post story, the local congressman, Jamie Raskin, showed his support for the woofers by bringing his dog.
Hanging over the barking debate was the specter that outsiders, with D.C. plates, no less, were driving to the park with their D.C. dogs, who were surely less well behaved than the poodles and golden retrievers of Chevy Chase Village.
In the end, Leonard and a majority of her colleagues on the Village board sided with the irritated neighbors over the rowdy pups and voted Sept. 9 to disestablish America’s most prestigious dog park.
