A frequent visitor to Drake Park sounds an alarm. 

What people can and can’t do in Bend’s parks and park facilities may be changing. There are new proposed rules for e-bikes in parks. There are new proposed rules for how long people can stay in the bathroom. There are new specifics of how people may be excluded from parks and park facilities.

Those are some of the changes the board of the Bend Park & Recreation District is scheduled to consider on Tuesday.

The park district last updated its rules in 2018. A team at the district has been working on an update.

E-bikes whizzed in a few years ago and state law and local regulations have been trying to catch up ever since. The park district had already allowed them. It’s doing some tweaking. The concept is to allow pedal-assist bikes on trails and in parks. Throttle-assist bikes would only be allowed in parking areas, just like other motor vehicles.

Throttle-assist e-bikes are on park district trails today, as well as park district grass. A change in the rules may mean less of that, but there are not enough park district stewards to catch every violation. The park district is certainly not going to call Bend Police for every possible violation. That same challenge applies to any change in the rules.

The district has had some temporary rules for how bathrooms can be used since July. It may formalize those and add to them. No longer will people be able to just go into a bathroom and stay. There will be a 10-minute limit. More than one person will not be allowed in a bathroom at a time, unless it is a caregiver, parent or guardian. And personal items cannot be stored in district bathrooms.

Those three changes should give the district levers to keep bathrooms being used for what they should be used for.

The language that describes the district’s exclusion process may be revised to be much more specific. Under the new rules, there would be classes of exclusions that ramp up based on the severity of behavior, with a corresponding lengthening of the time of the exclusion. For instance, under the proposed change in the rules, a person could get the most severe form of exclusion — Class 4, which is for between 181 days and a year — for actual harm to people or property, evidence of bias crimes and failure to comply with an enforcement officer and more. Under the old rules, the policy was not spelled out as completely and there were no classes and corresponding lengths of exclusions. The advantage of the change will likely be more uniformity, so people are treated similarly.

And last of all, the leash for a dog or cat in the parks can’t be longer than 15 feet, under a proposed rule change. It should help keep animals under better control of their owners and reduce conflicts. Not everyone loves a pet as much as its owner.

You can find more about the proposed rules and the meeting here: tinyurl.com/Bendparksmeeting.