Nearly 20 years after the city launched its Scoop the Poop campaign in response to elevated bacteria levels in Austin's lakes and creeks, dog waste in the Barton Creek greenbelt continues to be a problem.



Bacteria levels in local streams have improved since the city launched the program, partly due to its efforts to provide bags for dog owners and educate the public on the issue, but dog waste still threatens park water quality and enjoyment of the greenbelt. Often seen next to the trails, hung in trees or tossed in a bush, dog waste is a major worry for park rangers due to its effect on water quality, while trail users complain about the public nuisance.

When park rangers went out to survey the problem in the spring, they found 28 piles of poop, both bagged and unbagged, in the quarter-mile between the trail head that leads to Twin Falls and the falls itself, said David Papke, park ranger supervisor for the Barton Creek greenbelt. The findings are a snapshot of what rangers might find at any given day in that area, he said.

"Austin is like a Mecca for the bagless (poop), with overflowing dispensers at every turn, and all it seems to achieve is that people strew trails with them full of poop," wrote one commenter on Reddit last year.

Whether dog waste is bagged or not, it is considered litter, Papke said, and it's against the law to leave it behind. Despite the potential $500 fines, dog waste is consistently one of the top three types of trash the rangers see on the greenbelt. City employees said it is difficult for police to cite people for leaving dog waste because they must see the incident happen to write a citation. It is unclear how many citations police have doled out to offenders. The city has not yet provided such numbers in response to an American-Statesman open records request.



When the Scoop the Poop campaign began in 2000, it introduced pet waste bags in city parks for the first time. Since then, the campaign has added hundreds more dispensers and has worked to raise public awareness of dog waste as a public nuisance and a detriment to water quality.



Dog waste carried by runoff into local streams increases bacteria such as E. coli and giardia, as well as parasites, viruses and other pathogens, said Andrew Clamann, senior environmental scientist at Austin Watershed Protection. Clamann said these pathogens can travel long distances downstream and infect other dogs and humans.

Any dog waste left on the ground will make it into park water, as bags often tear open or break down, Clamann said.

"Any storm, no matter how small, carries waste particulates into the waterways," he said.

For this reason, Clamann advises against swimming in park waterways after a storm.

Dog waste also disrupts the natural ecology in park waters. Dog waste feeds algae in the water and can cause algal blooms, Clamann said, which increase dissolved oxygen during the day, but cause a significant drop at night and lead to fish dying by asphyxiation. While that problem might sound similar to blue-green algae found near Red Bud Isle, which reportedly led to some dog deaths, Clamann says the Lady Bird Lake algae is unrelated to dog waste.

Urban wildlife — such as coyotes, raccoons, squirrels and deer — also contribute a small amount of bacteria in creek water, Clamann said, but this is a normal process that results in low levels of bacteria that are rarely a cause for concern. He said problems occur when large amounts of bacteria are added through dog waste. The wild animals’ digestive systems are fairly efficient and do not leave many nutrients behind in feces, Clamann said, while pet digestive systems are not.

Despite the dispensers, the waste probably is littered along the trails due to the lack of trash cans and because people simply do not want to carry it with them, city officials said. While there are trash cans at the trailheads, there are none along the trails. If a visitor were to walk the entire greenbelt, they could walk 7 miles without encountering a trash can.

The city has avoided adding trash cans along the trails because it would be too difficult for maintenance crews to go out on miles of trails every day to empty them, Papke said. Some environmental groups also have complained they interfere with the natural experience on the trails and have asked the city not put them in, he said. The parks department empties the trash cans at the trailheads twice a day, but there is no city-organized cleanup on the trails or elsewhere in the parks.

City employees typically intervene when there are unexplained high levels of bacteria in a waterway, and they can take many different measures such as closing a park, increasing vegetation to reduce waste transport into creeks or stepping up public education effort, as it did with the Scoop the Poop program.