While Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, faces substantial attacks from President Trump, his wife is facing another battle: neighbors in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., fed up with barking dogs.
Elissa Leonard, chairwoman of the village board of Chevy Chase, Maryland, where the average household income is nearly $500,000, is in the middle of a feud over a dog park that has neighbors often calling police.
The drama was detailed by the Washington Post in an article published Wednesday.
Nearly a year ago, the village spent $134,000 to turn 15,000 square feet of land into a fenced-in dog park. After a few weeks, signs condemning barking dogs were placed around the park. The police began receiving calls almost daily with noise complaints, especially from one neighbor whose house borders the park.
The complaints became so frequent that by May the Chevy Chase Village Board of Managers held a public hearing on the matter. Two more hearings were held in June and July.
“Around dinner time, I’d like to be able to sit on my deck and maybe read a book and chat with a friend or have a glass of wine, and the dogs are barking,” Joanie Edwards, the neighbor who frequently called police, said at the first hearing.
Edwards, a retired elementary school teacher, said she has resorted to turning on music to drown out the barking.
“People in the community keep saying, ‘She should get another dog, if she had a dog, it would be different,’” she said. “Well, first of all, I am a very considerate person, and if I had a dog, and he was barking in my back yard, I would bring him in. If my children were in a restaurant crying, I would take them out.”
“As residents of Chevy Chase, how many times is it acceptable for you to be bothered in your house every day?” real estate developer Tom Bourke, whose house is across the street from the park, said at June’s hearing. “You’ve created a nuisance.”
Bourke’s wife, Dale, said she heard some of the dog owners trying to quiet their canines, but alleged the dog owners coming from outside of the community were not as considerate of neighbors.
“I don’t mean to characterize the District, but I just notice that they have District plates on their cars, and they have very little regard for us or our property … there are dogs barking and they’re just not doing anything,” she said.
Doug Gansler, a former Maryland attorney general, joked that the complainers “should be put in jail.”
Patty Martin, who owns the dog park’s unofficial mayor, a French bulldog named Louie, said she has heard rumors that Edwards, whose husband is a lawyer, has threatened to sue the village over the park.
“Well, many dog park users are lawyers, too, so we’re wondering, should we get a lawyer? Do we have grounds to sue?” Martin said.
Leonard, whose Norwich terrier Pippa does not visit the dog park, explained to residents that they could not limit access to the dog park to just the people and their pets who live in the immediate neighborhood.
The village board did change the opening time from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. and removed the park’s existence from the community’s website. It also paid $1,300 to a woman with a graduate degree in epidemiology to spend time at the park studying the behavior of the dogs and their owners. After 54 visits, the woman had no solution for barking dogs.
The next hearing on the future of the dog park is scheduled for Sept. 9.
