Dog lovers eager to see areas in City parks where Fido could slip his leash and express the full spectrum of his doggie nature have woofed about it for years.

The City’s Parks Board listened and liked.

By mid- to late-September it opens, just shy of two acres inside Roegner Park north of Auburn Riverside High School, the City of Auburn’s first off-leash dog park.

OK, for the moment it’ll be strictly a “let’s see how it goes” sort of off-leash affair, but still.

“There’s going be this one for now because this is all the money we have in the budget to do at the moment,” said Daryl Faber, director of Auburn Parks, Arts and Recreation. “We’ll look at the success of that because there’s another two that we are hoping to institute next year.”

To find the future site, just look for a large area between the Auburn Riverside High school softball fields and the white river trail walking path. The site, Faber said, offers river access, bathrooms and is expandable. Plus, many dog owners already use the White River Trail to walk their dogs. On the other hand, parking is limited.

The total cost of bringing the long, linear strip of land up to snuff for Spot and his pals will be about $9,500, mostly for fencing.

“Basically at this one, we chose a rounded fence post system like King County and the City of Renton have used to keep costs down,” Faber said. “There will be separate areas for small and for large dogs. We’ll bring water to it, and there will be parking within a couple hundred yards.”

City crews will install the fencing, but Faber is looking for volunteers to spread mulch and help with the upkeep.

Park hours will be dawn to dusk.

Faber emphasized that this is not about building a dog park from scratch because the City doesn’t have the land for that.

“The City of Victoria (B.C.) did this four or five years ago,” Faber said. “They tested sites for a year to see how they worked, analyzed the sites, and if things didn’t work, they could potentially go to another site and so on. We’re not building an off-leash dog park where a City gets 10 new acres, and it’s just built by design to be a park. We didn’t find any of those opportunities. What we found were areas of parks that were under used and we thought had some real strengths in relation to off-leash areas.”

Other potential sites are as follows:

• Auburndale Park on Lea Hill: Not only is the area under used it’s also buffered between the off-leash area and the nearest neighbor. But it lacks bathrooms and would require additional parking. The neighborhood would also have to buy into the idea.

• Isaac Evans Park: The City is looking at an area on the south end of the park near the pump station. On the plus side, there is neighboring property to worry about, it is also expandable to more than an acre, and there is a restroom at the north end of the park. But the parking lot would have to be expanded.

• Lakeland Hills Park: It would serve the entire Lakeland Hills community and use an underdeveloped bit of property. There is also only one adjacent homeowner to work with. On the down side, it is only about a half-acre site, there is no room to expand, it offers limited parking and there are no bathrooms.

Most, but not all, of the sites would require some level of fencing, just to keep the dogs separate from the rest of the parks.

“We’re not looking at putting in a huge amount of infrastructure, like maybe you would at a dog park, where you’d have drinking fountains and restrooms,” Faber said. “We’re just talking about dogs running off leash and maybe catching a Frisbee or something.”