Caging up costs : County considers cutting funding for impounding stray animals
Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008
ANDY SHUPE Northwest Arkansas Times Cpl. Aaron Tomlinson, animal control officer with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, unloads one of two dogs picked up on Gun Club Road in northwest Washington County Friday at the Fayetteville Animal Shelter.
It came up at a recent county judge candidates forum and in this year's county budget talks.
Justice of the Peace H. L. Goodwin Jr., chairman of the Quorum Court Finance Committee, in budget talks earlier this week raised the idea of cutting its funding.
He is talking about cutting the amount of money the county spends to impound stray animals in the Fayetteville Animal Shelter by about $ 18, 000 a year.
In making the argument for the cuts, Goodwin wants to use more county funds this year to fund juvenile diversion programs, which are programs designed to keep juveniles out of the detention center and further trouble.
The animal control cut would bring the estimated county cost to about $ 75, 000 a year.
In conjunction with this discussion, Goodwin is talking about a way for the county to recoup some of the cost from owners.
Abandoned animals Cpl. Aaron Tomlinson and Deputy Lori Hodges are the animal control officers with the Washington County Sheriff's Office. Tomlinson says the two deal with "a lot of abandoned animals."
While some calls can be attributed to the lack of a leash law in the county, he said, there are also a lot of stray animal calls from people.
Whenever there are extreme temperatures "we have a lot of issues with shelter and water, that kind of thing," he said.
He said there is an average of five or six animals a week taken to the shelter - a conservative estimate. He said there are more dogs than cats picked up that are abandoned.
"It's a problem that continues to grow," he said. "The more dense the population gets in the county, the more problem we're going to have with stray animals."
He said there is going to be a need within the next few years for more animal control personnel to handle the problem.
Five-day hold Jill Hatfield, animal services superintendent for the city of Fayetteville, said the Fayetteville Animal Shelter holds all animals for five days before they are eligible for adoption or euthanasia. The shelter charges $ 15 a day to hold the animals, for a total of $ 75. A five-day hold, Hatfield said, is fair to owners - as well as to the animals - who may be on vacation or away for the weekend. Hatfield said she does not know if reducing the hold number to three days, for instance, would be fair. "I think there's other ways to reduce cost," she said. "You might get to a point in the year where you can't bring in any more animals," she said, adding that this is up to the county to decide. She said the two animal control officers in the county already are flooded with calls about animal concerns, and the biggest problem is dumped animals. "It's hard because you have to give Washington County a pat on the back for offering a free spay and neuter program," she said. "That's just unheard of."
One cost-saving measure some shelters are resorting to, she said, is that if a person wants to surrender an animal because he or she cannot afford to raise it any longer, the person pays a fee to the shelter to help offset costs.
Justice of the Peace Steve Zega says he has concerns about animal control cuts.
"I think we've had a pretty good arrangement with the city of Fayetteville in terms of contracting with their shelter," he said.
He said he is concerned that there could be a problem with more wild animals in the county if the first thing the county does is cut its animal control.
Four of his eight years on the Quorum Court, he said, animal control is the secondor third-leading cause of what people would come and "talk to us about. "He said they would say the county needs more animal control not less of it.
Zega says he also worries about the public health aspect of the issue. Cutting that budget, he said, would result in increased chances of more incidents of rabies and other animal-borne and carried illnesses.
"I really want to be careful about that before we start talking about animal control," he said.
If animal control money is cut, he said, his first instinct would be to cut the days the county pays for the animal at the shelter, not the number of animals picked up by animal control.
"I think you'd run into a whole lot of problems in Canehill and Morrow and Wheeler if we're not coming to get this dog you think might be vicious and rabid," he said. Spay and neuter program The county spay and neuter program, which operates in unincorporated areas of the county and cities with populations of 10, 000 or fewer, has been in existence since 2003, when seed money was donated.
Since that time and up until this year's budget, Darling said, actual expenditures for the program had averaged $ 35, 000 to $ 40, 000.
The budget this year was $ 25, 000, and nearly all of it is already expended. The budget year ends Dec. 30.
There is another $ 25, 000 budgeted for 2009 in looking at preliminary budget figures.
Tomlinson says he believes spaying and neutering helps.
"If we didn't have the spay and neuter program, we'd be more behind than we already are," he said.
Hatfield says people who do not spay and neuter animals may turn around and bring in stray puppies, and the county pays for sheltering.
"It's unfortunate that more people do not take advantage of the programs that are out there," she said. "You have to give the county kudos for trying to stop the unwanted population."
In some areas of the United States, spaying and neutering is mandatory, she said.
She says she wishes she could see the number of stray animals decreasing but "we're seeing a steady increase every year."
"Unfortunately, we're not touching enough of the population to put a dent in the unwanted animal population," she said.
Zega says he believes spaying and neutering of animals is a good idea. "We have too many dogs and cats," he said.
But, he said, as somebody who budgets money for programs in the county "the real difficulty is figuring out a way to measure that program's effectiveness."
If $ 15, 000 worth of cats and dogs are spayed and neutered, he said, how many is that, relative to the county population ?
"It's so hard to figure out how many births we're preventing," he said.
"As a percentage of the total wild dog and cat population in this county, what are we reaching in that program ? "he said.
He said "you can't ever know the true populations. You can't ever know the impact the spay and neuter program is having."
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