It’s a neighborhood battle that’s bad to the bone.
Some residents in a wealthy Washington, DC, suburb want to ban barking at a local dog park — and politically connected pooch lovers sure aren’t yappy.
The neighbors in Chevy Chase Village in Maryland — which include a Trump-appointed official and a former state attorney general — are duking it out over a patch of land that was turned into an off-leash hotspot, with some neighbors calling it a noisy headache, according to The Washington Post.
At the center of the dogfight is Chevy Chase Village Board chair Elissa Leonard — the wife of Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, whom President Trump blamed for tanking the stock market last week.
“You’ve created a nuisance,” real estate developer Tom Bourke howled to Leonard at a recent village meeting. “How many times is it acceptable for you to be bothered in your house every day?”
The fur began flying last fall after the town spent $134,000 to turn a muddy triangle of land into a fenced-in space where pooches could play.
Residents surrounding the park — where homes range from from $1.1 million to $22.5 million — soon began calling cops to complain that they’d been bombarded by the nonstop sound of loud pups.
Some blamed “a certain standard poodle whose name should be withheld,” one neighbor said, according to the paper.
And they demanded a rule banning yappy dogs, and forbidding folks from outside the neighborhood from using the park — which was partially funded by the state — to no avail.
But well-heeled pooch owners fired back, saying residents griping about barking should have their tails between their legs.
“They should be put in jail,” said Doug Gansler, a former Maryland attorney general and one-time gubernatorial candidate — as his spaniel, Jack, searched for a dog to play with at the park.
As the board’s chair, Leonard, who has a Norwich terrier named Pippa, said she has tried to please both sides.
The board wiped info about the dog park from the village website to stop outsiders from using it and changed the opening time from 7 to 8 a.m. It also paid $1,300 for a woman with a graduate degree in epidemiology to study the behavior of the dogs and their owners, according to the paper.
“One of these people did allow his dog to relieve himself on the green space next to the street,” she reported at a recent village meeting.
Neighbor Joanie Edwards and others now plan to flood a public hearing on Sept. 9 and push for the green space be converted to a regular non-dog park.
“I’d like to be able to sit on my deck and maybe read a book and chat with a friend or have a glass of wine, and the dogs are barking,” Edwards said.
But they won’t likely succeed in scoring a no-barking rule, said Pat Murphy, who moderates the group Save the Chevy Chase Dog Park. “What are they going to do next, [try to] ban dancing?”