BELFAST - For each of the last seven years, volunteers from Friends of Belfast Parks have donned rubber gloves and a sense of humor and picked up a winter’s worth of dog feces at the city’s waterfront parks. They called it “April Stools Day,” but this year they’re just calling it a day.

Carol Good, president of FOBP, broke the news to the City Council Tuesday. The group had voted against hosting an eighth event, she said, partly out of concern that dog owners might slack off knowing that a spring clean up was on the calendar every year.

“We don’t want to be enablers,” she said.

Additionally, she said, the number of “incidents” has dropped significantly, from a staggering 800 and 900 respectively in the first two years, to fewer than 200 last year. 

“It’s still a problem,” she said.“[But] it’s less of a problem.”

In the early years, the sensational numbers and the party-like atmosphere of the event — a “golden” stool hidden in advance with a prize going to the finder; a dog-themed soundtrack blasting from a car stereo — brought a fair amount of attention to the problem of dog waste in city parks.

But on Tuesday, Good joked that her annual reports to the Council had become predictable.

“I won’t come back here to tell you how many poops we picked up,” she said. “Because we’re not going to pick them up.”

Good said FOBP will continue to do public education to encourage owners to pick up after pets. She also noted that there are plastic bag dispensers mounted in several places along the waterfront for those who don’t have one on hand. 

City Manager Joe Slocum raised the possibility of issuing citations. Good liked the idea but wasn’t sure if it was an appropriate thing to ask of police. Slocum said he would talk to the city’s animal control officer, who, he said, also has the authority to write tickets.

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com