Dog Waste Removal in Lacey

Lacey is built on old prairie. Across the east side the soil is Spanaway gravelly sandy loam and Everett gravel, excessively drained glacial outwash, the ground Oregon white oak colonized long before the subdivisions did. Water does not sheet off it, it goes straight down. That is an odd thing to have under a dog yard: the mess never washes to a curb and becomes somebody else's problem. It stays put, it breaks down, and whatever is left of it percolates.

Straight down is the part that matters. Every drop Lacey drinks is groundwater, pulled by 20 wells out of three aquifers, and the city has run a Wellhead Protection Program since 1995. Lacey's own stormwater page does the arithmetic on the other end: roughly 21,960 pounds of dog waste lands in Thurston County every day, the equivalent of 17,133 people, and it names Henderson Inlet, where bacteria counts close shellfish beds and where Woodland Creek delivers this town's runoff.

Two roads carry this town and Marq names both of them. Martin Way East is the old highway running the length of Lacey into Olympia, and Marvin Road is the north-south one off I-5 exit 111 that opens into Hawks Prairie, where Cabela's put 185,000 square feet on Gateway Boulevard. There is a coffee stand on each: Good Vibes on Martin Way, Cafe Elite over on Marvin Road. That geography is why Lacey runs as two half-days rather than one loop, and why the yard you are booking gets a consistent slot instead of drifting around the week.

Not every lot drains like the prairie. The till soils carry Alderwood, which sits on a hardpan that perches water for months, so those yards stay heavy well past March. Neighborhood matters too. Hawks Prairie and Meridian Campus took most of Lacey's growth, and the canopy paid for it, 43 percent tree cover in 2004 down to 28 percent at the last count, the northeast being the reason. Small fenced lots with no shade hide nothing. Tanglewilde and Thompson Place off Martin Way run the opposite way, older houses on roomier ground under real Douglas fir, and out toward Beachcrest the fir and cedar duff buries a week's worth until somebody finds it barefoot.

A city of nearly 59,000 people also has almost nowhere to turn a dog loose. Code keeps them leashed outside a fenced area Lacey has specifically designated, and the city parks capital plan still carries an off leash dog area as a planning stage project with the location marked TBD. So the yard is the exercise yard, plus leashed miles on the Chehalis Western Trail and the Karen Fraser Woodland Trail where the two meet at Hub Junction. Back lawns here absorb more traffic than their square footage suggests.

Then there is the rain, close to 50 inches a year at this end of the corridor, about a foot more than Sea-Tac, arriving as a long grey drip from October into April. Dooky Squad runs dog waste removal in Lacey, WA on a set schedule for exactly that reason, from Horizon Pointe and Mushroom Corner to the lake neighborhoods around Long Lake, Hicks Lake, and Pattison. Same route, same day, whatever the sky is doing.