County kennel plan still on the table

The county continues to explore the option of building its own pound, but now accelerated by the emotional reaction that had many pet lovers concerned that animal welfare would suffer without the Humane Society of Yuma being the first stop for stray cats and dogs after animal control officers took them off the street.

Yuma County Administrator Robert Pickels told HSOY's board of directors at their meeting last week that he wasn't expecting such a sense of urgency when he first floated the concept of a centralized “transitional facility,” run in cooperation with the area's cities, in January. The county regularly evaluates its programs to see how it can achieve or improve efficiencies, a process that typically takes a few months, he said – but in this instance, anxieties rose quickly to the surface and forced the dialogue at a quicker pace.

Pickels said it's prudent to finish an evaluation once it's been started, but he feels that officials will reach a fair solution.

“We're still not through that evaluation process, but I think as we near the end of that process we see things a little bit differently now than we did at the start of the process, and the conversations that we've had and the issues that we've addressed have been very, very positive. So I definitely want to thank those of you that have worked with us through that process,” Pickels told the humane society's board of directors at their Thursday meeting.

Last month, Pickels brought the transitional kennel scenario in front of the Board of Supervisors, explaining how a facility run in cooperation with Somerton, San Luis, Wellton and the city of Yuma could ultimately reduce and stabilize the unexpectedly increasing kennel expenses that it pays to the Humane Society of Yuma, which continues to receive animals even though Yuma County started its own animal control patrol division last summer. HSOY formerly provided animal control duties for the county, and the other municipalities, as well.

Yuma County, so far, has found its in-house animal control team busier than the previous HSOY crew, with more calls for service and animal impounds. The county initially projected saving about $93,000 with the switch, but with the bump in impoundments and the addition of staff hours, the savings could come out close to a wash.

Board of Supervisors chairman Greg Ferguson, who joined Pickels at the HSOY meeting along with Yuma City Administrator Greg Wilkinson, said the county's objective with the possible kennel was to make costs predictable for budgeting purposes.

“People say we were doing this to save money, we were doing this to cut costs, he said. “No, it was to control costs.”

The potential county kennel, which would cost an estimated $1.5 million to build, would essentially be a holding facility for pets. Animals picked up by the area's animal control officers – mostly dogs, but also stray cats from within the city of Yuma – would be placed into the county kennel first, with the preference that they be returned to their owners. Impounded animals that aren't reunited with their owners after being held for the maximum amount of time – five days for licensed animals, three if unlicensed – would either be sent to the HSOY shelter or a rescue group for adoption, or euthanized.

Pickels said he thinks operational concerns have now been nearly resolved, and the municipalities continue to work through fiscal concerns. He said the county should be able to revisit that area in April, using an expanded nine-month data set rather than the six months they had been tentatively working with. He said a full year would be better, but as this is the first year of county animal control and the next fiscal year's budget must be prepared well before the current year has ended, nine months would be better than six.

“I think we're going to come up with a proposal that is going to provide stability for both of us,” he said.

Pickels said later that the county is now able to better understand certain issues from the other side. For instance, that meant seeing how reliant HSOY is on the revenue stream it gets from its contracts with the various local governments to provide kennelling, and how its vision of animal control is less emphatic on patrol work and more on spay and neuter programs that reduce overpopulation before it happens.

Pickels said numbers used in his January presentation to the Supervisors were rather irrelevant because, while making lasting decisions would require specific figures, at that time it was just a rough concept and all he wanted to do was move forward with exploration.

Pickels told the HSOY board that this experience could clarify their relationship as more of a partnership and less of a vendor-customer pairing. Without revealing details, he did say he wants to be pragmatic and equitable, whether the county builds a kennel or not.

“We're not going to retreat from the evaluation process but I think ultimately that the progress that we've made, the good progress that we've made, in a positive direction may provide us the ability to continue with this partnership that we've forged with the humane society,” he said.

HSOY Board member Page Misenhimer said that as citizens, humane society supporters would also appreciate the county spending less on animal control and more on other issues, and he agreed with Pickels' idea that speeding up the dialogue on the possible kennel wasn't a bad thing.

“I agree the way we got there wasn't necessarily very fun, but I think that it pushed us all together faster,” he said. “(It) was actually beneficial because it's going to deal with a lot of stuff quicker.”