San Jose’s new pickup line: No more doggie bags

Reporting from San Francisco —  The cash-strapped city of San Jose, searching for fat to trim from its budget for the 10th year running, recently came across a novel expenditure that seemed ripe for the trimming.

At a time when police have been laid off, library hours slashed and some city functions contracted out, officials figured they just couldn’t afford to spend $60,000 a year on bags to protect municipal parks from the droppings of municipal pooches — and an additional $51,000 on staff to keep the parks stocked.

As of July 1, the city stopped buying doggie bags and filling the 150 or so dispensers located in nearly 200 parks. But when the pet pouches began running out toward the middle of August, the fur began to fly.

Some doggie devotees and open-space aficionados were aghast that San Jose had stopped fulfilling what they see as a critical municipal function; it is cheaper, they argued, to supply bags than hire staff to scoop poop. Others (cat lovers, perhaps?) questioned why the city was enabling bad bichon behavior while the budget deficit soared.

“Wait, all this time we’ve been paying for this?” posted one frugal San Jose resident on a local newspaper website. “Since I don’t have a dog, can I get back reimbursement for my TP? Just saying.”

Wrote another about the bag brouhaha: “In my country, they eat dog to survive.”

Julie Edmonds-Mares, San Jose’s acting director of parks, recreation and neighborhood services, said news of the bag cuts caused a more visceral reaction than most trims to her department, which lost 20% of its funding. Her department’s staff has been cut by nearly a third, and its water budget has been drying up.

“The dog-bag cut was part of a $115-million reduction [to departments] citywide,” she said. “Now the community has come forward and said, ‘You know what? We want to put those bags back.’ ”

James Reber, executive director of the nonprofit San Jose Parks Foundation, said his organization has begun raising money and working with the city to figure out a resupply plan. Anything bigger than a pocket park draws dogs and their owners, he said, and both rely on the bag dispensers.

San Jose officials “put them in during flush times — no pun intended,” Reber said. “It makes for a more civilized situation. But we don’t live in those times anymore.”

Terry Reilly, co-founder of the Friends of the San Jose Rose Garden, said he has been fielding calls from residents wanting to donate and volunteer. He found a vendor selling the pet pouches at a lower price than the city had been paying, and recently put in an order for $900 worth. City Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio has donated $1,000 to the cause.

A grateful Edmonds-Mares said she was working with Reber’s and Reilly’s groups to craft a system for distributing the bags as widely and seamlessly as possible.

As far as Reber is concerned, it can’t happen soon enough.

“Everybody who talks to me about it comes up with some line like, ‘You’ve really stepped in it this time,’ ” said a rueful Reber. “ ‘You’ve made the best of a crappy situation.’ ‘Everything you can doo, you doo.’ It’s like being in eighth grade.”

He paused. “I’m kind of pooped out from this one.”

maria.laganga@latimes.com