KCACC Exposed Opposes Constantine's Flawed Plan
BY: KCACC Exposed Co-Chairs 6/14/2010
On June 14, 2010, KCACC Exposed submitted the following letter in opposition to Executive Dow Constantine's proposed Regional Animal Services Plan, along with a 36-page, 16-point position paper outlining the specific reasons for our opposition.
We asked the King County Council to impose strict requirements on the animal services program, before continuing past 2010 to subsidize the expensive, broken system with roughly $2 million a year from the county general fund. While we expect that the King County Council will approve initial funding for this program -- the county executive has left it little other choice -- we urge it to insist that the executive go back to the drawing board to reduce the program's outrageous price tag, find a funding source that will not force stuggling families to give up their beloved pets, make shelter reforms to ensure humane treatment for the animals, and revise animal control and cruelty investigations to adequately protect both the animals and the people of King County.
Following is the full text of our letter, which can also be viewed in pdf form here.
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Dear Members of the King County Council:
It is with heavy hearts that we write you in opposition to the Regional Plan for Animal Services (“Regional Plan”) proposed by Executive Dow Constantine. Despite our initial support for a regional approach to animal services, and our continuing support of the concept, we have concluded that as proposed, the Regional Plan fails to deliver in its promises to the animals, taxpayers, and citizens of King County. As a result, we urge the King County Council to demand much more before it commits to subsidizing this expensive, broken system for the next two-and-a-half years.
We arrived at this conclusion only after repeated efforts to raise our concerns with Executive Constantine and his staff, and a painstaking analysis of all the materials that Executive Constantine transmitted to the council on June 1, including the Roadmap for Reform, the budgetary and fiscal documents, the proposed changes in the King County Code, and the transmittal letter for the proposal. We have detailed our conclusions in the attached 36-page position paper, which raises 16 specific points of concern in five distinct areas. The paper also outlines our conclusions and our specific recommendations for council action.
This Regional Plan is a mistake, pure and simple. It is little more than the status quo under a different name, and with a revised funding model. It makes empty promises of reform without the fundamental changes needed for that reform, fails to ensure humane care and protection for the county’s animals, poses a threat to public safety, relies on a deeply flawed funding model, and is devoid of partnerships with private shelters like the Seattle Humane Society. It was a mistake for the Executive to put this plan forward, and it would be a mistake for the King County Council to ratify it by providing the requested funding and making the requested changes in the county code.
At this point, we are still hopeful that it was a mistake made with the best of intentions, and that given another opportunity, the Executive will correct the missteps contained in his proposal. In fact, we have written a separate letter to Executive Constantine begging for him to reconsider the wisdom of this plan, and to go back to the drawing board with the help of local and national expertise, to draft a plan that will achieve the results that we have all sought for so long.
Our specific concerns with the Regional Plan are detailed in the attached position paper. They are as follows:
- Development of the Regional Plan. In formulating the Regional Plan, the Executive ignored the King County Council’s mandates to discontinue sheltering services and require full-cost recovery for control services. No meaningful exploration was made of the possibilities for private partnerships, in order to provide better services at a lower cost. Instead of attempting to shift the responsibility for animal sheltering and control services to the municipalities, executive staff pushed reluctant municipalities to join the Regional Plan despite their significant misgivings. In addition, the plan was drafted without serious consideration of fundamental reforms that could have immediately resulted in substantially improved shelter conditions and better protection for the people and animals of our community. Finally, the Regional Plan was put together without any meaningful input from key stakeholders or experts in the field.
- Financial Costs and Funding. The Regional Plan imposes high costs on King County taxpayers, municipal taxpayers, and pet owners, which are not justified by the poor quality of the services provided. For example, the costs of sheltering alone are between $460 and $724 per animal (depending on shelter population estimates), while total costs for animal services are between $1,029 and $1,218 per animal, or around $7.20 per capita. These costs exceed the price of superior services offered by potential private partners, and are significantly in excess of the costs of other animal services programs around the country that are far more successful. Despite the council’s mandate to end the general fund subsidy for animal services, a massive amount of funding for this program would continue to come from the county’s general fund – between $1.7 million and $2 million a year over the next several years. In addition to this subsidy, the primary funding source for the Regional Plan is a punitive system of licensing and fees that will result in more animals being impounded and killed, and will place unreasonable burdens on King County pet owners who have the least ability to pay.
- Animal Cruelty Investigations. The Regional Plan represents a betrayal of the Executive’s promise to transfer animal cruelty investigations to qualified law enforcement agencies, such as the King County Sheriff’s Office. Leaving these criminal investigations in the hands of unqualified, untrained, and ill-equipped KCACC employees, rather than given them to commissioned law enforcement officers, poses a significant danger to the safety of King County citizens, including crime victims and the KCACC employees themselves. In addition, it results in a continued failure to adequately protect animals in King County from abuse or neglect, or to competently prosecute such crimes when they occur.
- Misleading representations, empty promises, and misguided reforms. The Regional Plan is devoid of evidence of any meaningful reforms that have taken place at KCACC sufficient to demonstrate that the profoundly broken county animal services system can be fixed, and does not set forth any promises of reforms that would be adequate to solve KCACC’s persistent problems. In an attempt to sell the Regional Plan to the council and the public, the Executive makes misleading use of statistics reflecting KCACC’s past performance, and embraces past changes that he, until recently, had denounced as inadequate to justify the continuation of the county system. In addition, many of the changes proposed – such as the closure of the Crossroads shelter – are misguided, and will have negative repercussions that executive staff has not taken into account.
- Animal control. Despite the fact that the public safety threat posed by inadequate animal control services has been of great concern to the county’s municipalities, the Regional Plan offers no workable solution to this problem. Without any careful analysis of how to meet the region’s public safety needs, the plan provides for protection against free-roaming, aggressive dogs only five days a week, eight hours a day, and fails to account for the impact of animal control staffing changes on the ability to maintain humane shelter conditions.
We know that the council has been put in a difficult position with the proposal of the Regional Plan. Although the plan does not comply with past council mandates, a flat refusal to approve the requested funding at this point would further jeopardize the humane care and protection of animals in the county, and leave the municipalities without any immediate options for animal services. As a result, we suggest that the council find a compromise solution – approve most of the funding (but only a few of the county code changes) requested by the executive for 2010, but demand now that a series of actions be taken immediately to explore and analyze better options for animal sheltering, control, and cruelty investigations, before any funding is provided in subsequent years. (Our detailed suggestions for the actions that the Executive should be required to take are found starting on p. 31 of our position paper.)
While we know that the materials we are providing to you are extensive, we hope that you will take the time to review them, as they represent careful analysis of the essential points that we believe the council should consider before voting on the funding and code changes requested by the Executive. At the very least, we hope that the issues we explore will raise topics of discussion and questioning during the remaining hearings and private meetings that will be held to consider this issue before the council’s final vote.
Once again, the time has come for the King County Council to draw a line in the sand. For the past three years, we have worked with the council in trying to fix the broken animal services system, or to find better alternatives for services in the private sector. We have great respect for the stand that the council has previously taken on these issues. But, unfortunately, your bold action is needed again to make sure that reform is put on the right path, on behalf of the county’s taxpayers, municipalities, animals, and pet owners.
This reform cannot wait another two-and-a-half years, and if the council and the municipalities lock in guaranteed funding for that period of time, the urgency for reform will be removed. In government terms, we realize that two-and-a-half years is not a very long period of time. But it may literally be a lifetime for the thousands of animals who will be housed at KCACC during that period, for the animals who are suffering from neglect or abuse in our community, and for the county citizens who are endangered by the continuation of the status quo.
The time for change is long past. We hope that the council will have the strength to stand up and, once again, demand the change that the animals and taxpayers deserve.
As always, we will make ourselves available to answer any questions you may have about our reasons for opposing the Regional Plan, or to provide further detail in support of the points outlined in our position paper.
Sincerely,
Claire Davis
Kim Sgro
Co-chairs, KCACC Exposed