A Year Later, the Coral Gables Library Dog Park Still Doesn't Exist
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
"We're not here to debate whether a dog park is good or bad, that's your business," Jose Val told residents at a community meeting in February. "But it becomes our business when you want to put a dog park in our neighborhood, and we clearly don't want it."
Val was talking about a patch of grass most people drive past without a second look: a roughly 40,000-square-foot triangle at 520 University Drive, directly across from the Coral Gables Branch Library. The city has owned the parcel since a 1972 zoning action that marked it as overflow parking for library visitors, and for most of the five decades since, that is exactly what it has been. Nobody argued about it.
That changed last November. Ten months later, whether that lawn becomes the city's second off-leash dog park is still an open question, one that a Miami-Dade judge is now scheduled to answer in December.
On November 18, 2025, Mayor Vince Lago, Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson and Commissioner Richard Lara voted 3-0 to move the dog park forward. Commissioners Melissa Castro and Ariel Fernandez had left the meeting earlier for a prior commitment and were not present for the vote. The session had run long that night, and the mood in the chamber was, by most accounts, celebratory. Resident Mary Powell, who organized the push for the park, presented a petition with 225 signatures gathered in five days. Lago called it a turnout unlike anything he'd seen in 13 years in public service, saying he had "never seen so many people in support of one item."
What the commission approved that night was a resolution, not an ordinance. That distinction sounds procedural, and it is, but it is also the entire legal fight that followed. A resolution directed city staff to begin planning a dog park with specific design parameters, including a 30-to-50-foot landscape buffer. An ordinance, by contrast, would have required newspaper publication, multiple public readings and mailed notice to every property owner within a set radius, the kind of process Florida law reserves for actual changes in permitted land use. The city's position has been that authorizing staff to draw up plans is not the same as rezoning a parcel. Neighbors who live closest to University Drive disagree, and that disagreement is now a lawsuit.
By January 13, when the commission met again, the mood had shifted. Sara Cortes, who lives near the proposed site, told the Miami Herald she wasn't opposed to dog parks in general, just to putting one on this particular lawn. Commissioner Melissa Castro brought her own map to the meeting, showing more than a dozen households within 500 meters of the site marked in red as opposed. Powell brought a map of her own, showing the 225 petition signatures spread across the city along with an earlier round of signatures she'd collected for a different proposed dog park at Catalonia Park. City Manager Peter Iglesias told commissioners the city had not received complaints tied to its existing dog parks. The commission declined to reconsider its November vote.
A community design meeting followed on February 19 at the War Memorial Youth Center, a few blocks from the site. Roughly 50 residents showed up, and most of them were there to object, even though the meeting's stated purpose was gathering input on design details rather than revisiting the underlying decision. Several said they'd never received the door hanger notices the city said had gone out. A week before that meeting, the University Green Neighbors Association and resident Jose Val Cohen had already filed suit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, asking a judge to void the November resolution and block construction.
The complaint, filed by the law firm Homer Bonner Jacobs Ortiz, makes two claims. First, that the city needed to follow ordinance procedures under Florida's uniform municipal law rather than passing a simple resolution, since the change amounted to a shift in permitted use for the parcel. Second, that the November meeting itself may have violated Florida's Government in the Sunshine Act.
The city hired Holland & Knight to defend the case, with partner Anna Marie Gamez as lead counsel, and filed a motion to dismiss on April 1. That motion argues three things at once, any of which would end the case if a judge accepts it: that authorizing staff to plan a project is not a zoning action requiring special notice, that the November meeting was properly noticed under the city's standard practice, and that even if something went wrong procedurally in November, the January 13 meeting, where opponents showed up, spoke, and watched the commission decline to reverse course, cured it. Florida courts have held that a later public meeting with genuine deliberation can fix an earlier Sunshine Law problem, and that is the argument the city is leaning on. According to Coral Gables Gazette reporting, a trial is now scheduled for December.
Strip away the legal argument and the underlying project is fairly modest. The concept plan calls for 1,180 linear feet of fencing, 7,500 square feet of artificial turf and 21,350 square feet of natural sod, with an estimated cost north of $250,000. The design keeps the site's mature trees and adds landscaping meant to soften the view from the homes across the street.
Here is the detail that tends to get lost in the back and forth: the project has no money in the city's current five-year capital plan. It is intended to be funded entirely through private donations, and Coral Gables policy requires a separate commission vote for any donation over $50,000. That vote hasn't happened and can't happen until the lawsuit resolves one way or the other. So even setting aside the legal questions, nobody is breaking ground on University Drive without a second, unrelated commission decision that hasn't been scheduled.
Powell's case for the park, made to the commission back in November, was about supply. She told commissioners the city owns 70 parks, that 26 of them allow leashed dogs, and that only one, Salvadore Park on Andalusia Avenue, has an off-leash run. The Salvadore dog run opened in September 2023, and by most accounts it has been well used since. For a city with more than 50,000 residents, one off-leash acre is a thin margin, and that scarcity is the argument that got 225 signatures in five days.
The counterargument from University Drive has never really been about dogs at all. It's been about who gets a say before a quiet green space a few doors down changes use, and whether a resolution is the right vehicle for that kind of decision or whether it deserved the fuller, slower process an ordinance requires. That is a question that will keep coming up in Coral Gables long after this particular lawsuit ends, because the city is not short on small municipal parcels sitting quietly next to established neighborhoods.
For now, the grass across from the library looks exactly like it did a year ago. Whether it stays that way depends on a December trial date, and on a commission vote that hasn't been calendared yet.
If you live near University Drive, or anywhere in the Gables where a project like this could eventually land near you, it helps to know how these things actually move through City Hall before the signs go up. Eric Firestone Real Estate keeps an eye on Coral Gables civic news the same way we track its market, and we're happy to walk you through what a commission agenda item actually means for your block if you ever want a second read on one.
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