Dog Waste Removal in Silverdale

Silverdale has no city hall, which trips up people who go looking for one. It is unincorporated, an urban growth area the Kitsap County comprehensive plan governs, so there is no Silverdale pet waste ordinance to look up. Kitsap County Code Title 7 is the animal code that applies, and it declares the whole unincorporated county a single animal control zone. What catches up with a Silverdale yard is the slope it sits on.

The county plan puts Silverdale at the north end of Dyes Inlet, with Clear Creek running south into the inlet out of the highlands on three sides of it. Strawberry Creek comes off West Hill, through Old Town, and into the same water. There is a buried one as well, a culverted channel the county's design guidelines call Silverdale Creek, emptying into the inlet near Bay Shore Drive. All of it drains a retail core that the countywide planning policies and the Puget Sound Regional Council designated a regional growth center in 2003.

Ecology keeps a fecal coliform cleanup plan for Sinclair and Dyes Inlets because bacteria there limits where shellfish can be harvested safely, and Kitsap County Public Works names pet waste as one of the potential contributors. The county has been putting up Mutt Mitt stations since 2009. It puts the countywide total at more than 11 tons of dog waste a day, and its standing advice to owners is to scoop the yard weekly. Dog waste removal in Silverdale is a water question before it is a lawn question.

At the bottom of the basin the water moves both ways again. The Bucklin Hill Road bridge replaced two 72-inch culverts with a 240-foot span in 2016, and tidal flow from Dyes Inlet reaches back into the Clear Creek estuary. Good for salmon. It also means the bottom of this drainage is open saltwater, not a pipe.

Silverdale dogs get walked. The Clear Creek Trail runs the length of town on boardwalk and hard-packed gravel, from Dyes Inlet in the south to Schold Farm in the north, straight through the middle of the county's largest retail center. The dog park on Silverdale Way is run by a volunteer nonprofit board and split at 25 pounds. Newberry Hill Heritage Park adds another 1,082 acres. People are good about the bag out there, because other people are watching. The fenced yard behind the house is the part nobody sees. That is the part we take, from Old Town and West Hill up to Ridgetop, Bucklin Hill, Anderson Hill, and Sterling Hills. We bag it and it leaves with the truck.