Victoria breaks ground on Riverside Bark project inspired by teen

For Elizabeth “Izzy” Drane, a Girl Scout and Industrial High School student, a dog park in Victoria was her chosen Gold Award project with the Girl Scouts and is something she dreamed of as an avid animal lover. After almost a year since she died at age 16, the city of Victoria broke ground on Riverside Bark Wednesday.

The project is being funded through the Victoria Sales Tax Corp., which has allocated $500,000 for the project and is expected to be complete by May.

Elizabeth had a deep love of animals throughout her life and always was the one child who would always ask whether they could keep whatever animal they found, said her father Alex Drane. She volunteered at the Dorothy O’Connor Pet Adoption Center, and at home throughout her life, the Drane home had five dogs, two cats, about 20 guinea pigs and hamsters and a couple of rabbits.

That’s not including all the pets she’d “adopted” at Dorothy O’Connor that she claimed as her own but stayed at the center, he said.

Elizabeth approached the city with making the dog park a reality and was raising money for amenities for the park. Unfortunately, she died in February after a family cruise to the Bahamas when near the return she suffered an aortic dissection.

In the wake of her death, Elizabeth’s family and Girl Scout Troop 9566 continued fundraising for the park, raising almost $20,000, Drane said.

“People have been extremely generous,” he said. “We’ve had an exceptional amount of generosity with the community to help out with this dog park.”

City and park officials each spoke at the groundbreaking, all crediting Elizabeth for helping make the park a reality.

For the last few years, the city has been working on improving amenities for residents that improve the quality of life of the community, and Riverside Bark is another that is expected to improve the lives of the community, said City Manager Jesús Garza.

“She wanted to make sure that those that were less fortunate had what they needed,” Drane said. “I know she’s looking down, smiling over this whole situation because this is what she’s wanted for a very long time.”

Elizabeth had a heart big, enough to care for everybody, he said.

“In Isaiah, it says ‘a child shall lead them,’ and the best thing the commission and most all of us governmental bodies that have been involved in this to this point is to get out of the way of our friend Izzy Drane and the Girl Scout troop and let them lead the way to get this thing across the finish line,” Lee Keeling, Parks & Recreation Commission chairman.