City wants more burial plots, but northwest residents like their dog park

Calgary is running out of cemetery space and wants to expand an existing burial ground into an adjacent dog park.

The plan is not going over well with some local residents.

"Once they move to graveyard space, that corner is committed for 100 years or more and there are no changes possible," said Ron Stickley, one of dozens of angry residents who showed up at an open house on Wednesday.

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"Nobody asked us or even suggested we would like to donate our park to that."

The park space is next to Queen's Park Cemetery, the last burial ground built in Calgary,almost 80 years ago.

Space crunch

The city is looking at redesignatingthe six-acre plot at the corner of 32nd Avenue and 10th Street N.W.,turning what is now an off-leash park into 2,000 extra burial plots.

Doug Marter,the manager of capital planning andinfrastructure for Calgary Parks, said those spaces will give the city enough burial capacity for the next four to seven years.

It should be enough to deal with a space crunch.

"We are currently starting construction on a new cemetery in the deep southeast, but we are only underway right now and it won't be available for burials until about 2020," said Marter.

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He said that timeline assumes no delays and that the city is also looking for some land in the northwest a search that has already taken 10 years.

Compromise

Marter says there's room for compromise in Queen's Park.

"One of the proposals is to share the space, so we would take a portion of the dog park and expand the cemetery into that and leave a portion of it as dog park," he said.

"Plus there's another dog park right across the street that is off-leash."

This isn't the first time there's been a battle over this plot of land. The city tried to redesignateit in 2006, but the Cambrian Heights Community Association fought the application and won.

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