SMELLS LIKE IT, TASTES LIKE IT, SURE GLAD WE DIDN’T STEP IN IT

SMELLS LIKE IT, TASTES LIKE IT, SURE GLAD WE DIDN’T STEP IN IT: The drivel of an uninformed populace is always good for a cantankerous curmudgeonly laugh as we said a while back.

But these doggie debaters are dead serious in their solemnity making them all the more entertaining.

The factoids and what can only be described as opinionoids at Mel Rapozo’s blog continue to mount and if you’re not among the blithering blatherous you’d better not get anywhere near the hysterical at the Historic County Building next Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. for the official public hearings on three “dog path” bills- three bills which no one seems to have actually read.

In fact we haven’t read the full bills because Council Services prefers to waste reams of paper (and gasoline to pick them up) by not posting them on line... along with a lack of the Kaua`i County Code (KCC) that the bills are intended to amend.

And if we only read the agenda at the County web site no one would know what the three bills are about except that one is about “Parks and Recreation”, another is about “stray dogs” and a third is about the creation of “dog parks”.

But a look at the actual published legal notices shows what’s really going on- and that apparently no one posting one of the 190 comments on the subject at Mel’s blog has even has a rain check for a clue.

The first thing we found in the brief public notices is that we were right all along- people cannot currently be ticketed for having dogs on the bike path because, although dogs are banned from “County Parks”, the bike path is not a park- at lest not unless one of the proposed bills actually passes.

How do we know? Did Rapozo actually answer our numerous queries as he promised?

Are you kidding? No. One of the news bills, #2265 is actually proposed in order to make the path a park where dogs would be illegal and then at the same time it would allow dogs on/in the path/park.

It says:

Bill #2265: This Bill proposes to amend (Chapter 19 KCC 1987) related to Parks and Recreation by adding the definition of “Shared-use Path system” and a provision to allow leashed dogs on the county’s shared use path system.

Note how it says “by adding the definition” meaning it is not now part of the KCC.

So let’s get this straight. Right now the path is not a “park”- where dogs are banned by ordinance- as we insisted from day one but could not get any government official claiming it was a park to prove otherwise... because they were lying through their teeth when some said to the press that it was already “considered a linear park” and the local paper refused to get the facts straight despite our queries

Therefore no tickets issued to date for walking your dog there is valid at this point in time.

So dogs are legal on the path now and we have a bill to propose “making” them legal on the path by first making them illegal by officially defining the path as a park and in the same breath making them legal by a magnanimous gesture of our esteemed geniuses on the County Council.

Only on Kaua`i – and only in an election year- do we pass new laws to maintain the legal status quo.

Well at least those who thought walking dogs on the bike path was illegal and wanted to make it legal, those who thought it was legal and wanted it to be illegal and those who thought it was either illegal or legal and wanted to keep whichever way they thought the law read can now be put into two categories instead of four.. as long as the bill’s final; version does both make it illegal and then re-legalize it.

Clear as the uncleaned path’s runoff into the nearby ocean after a rain?

But the second bill is not only more revealing but even more absurd because it turns out that, although there is a leash law on Kaua`i there is no anti-dog poop law.

Again, right now, legally, there is no law against your dog taking a dump anywhere it’s allowed to be as long as it’s on a leash. Despite any and all claims that it is illegal for your dogs to poop anywhere and everywhere it isn’t.... yet.

The bill has two part. The first changes the length of required leashes from eight to six feet. But the second change reads as follows in the legal notice for the public hearing:

Bill # 2266... Adds a new section 22 2.5 “Nuisances Committed by Dogs” which makes it illegal for dog owners to allow dogs to defecate on public and private property and to require dog owners to have some kind of implement or device to pick up any waste deposited by their dog.

Note again that it “adds a new section” so there is no section on picking up after Fido to be amended right now, as has been claimed by loudmouth ignoramuses both public and County-employed

What genius wrote that public notice and presumably the new proposed ordinance?

Can a dog “commit” a nuisance? For that matter can anyone or anything? Don’t people “create” a nuisance and “commit” a crime stemming from the “creation” of that nuisance? And how exactly does a dog defecate on public “AND” (as opposed to “or”) private property? Does it look for the public-private property line and lay one directly on the line? Or possibly by walking from public to private property while depositing a long one using a moving version of Senator Larry Craig’s “wide stance”?

Scatological humor aside this bill would make it illegal- that is it would if it were written by someone with a little more brains than the dogs whose digestive processes it intends to regulate- not to carry around your pooper scooper and act out the that scene that, if dogs could laugh, would leave them rolling over without being commanded to do so.

We just can’t wait to see the caravan of K9-kukae-carnival in the Council’s Chamber-pot next week with messes both opinion-based and possibly of the stinky kine if people bring their pooches to the meeting as many have pledged to do.

It all begs a variation on the ancient philosophical question: If a real dog turd falls at a Council meeting about dog turds, first, is it a legal turd, and then will anyone hear about or smell it or clean it up, what with all the figurative feces that are expected to fly.