Controversial Switch To East Ridge Would Save Town $26,000
by Judy Frank
posted July 6, 2008
For East Ridge Animal Shelter Officer Jonathan Cooper, the Fourth of July was no holiday.
He and his wife, Sara, a veterinarian employed by Catoosa Veterinary Clinic, were hard at work by 10 a.m. hosing down dog runs, cleaning cat pans, and feeding and watering dozens of resident cats and dogs.
At the shelter – a tiny facility with just six cages for cats and 16 for dogs – there is a seemingly endless supply of stray and/or unwanted animals. That means that Officer Cooper and the shelter’s only other employee, Animal Control Supervisor Carl Zagona, are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“In a way we’re kind of like Sisyphus, trying over and over to roll a huge rock up a hill and never succeeding,” Officer Cooper said.
Yet it is to East Ridge that Signal Mountain officials – frustrated by the Humane Educational Society’s escalating financial demands and failure to provide accurate records – are turning for help with animal control.
The financial savings would be significant. Contracting with HES for animal control services for 2008-2009 would cost the town more than $36,000; East Ridge is asking just $10,000.
Other financially strapped communities, including Red Bank, are considering following Signal Mountain’s lead. And East Ridge, which plans to use some of the money from its proposed property tax increase to either upgrade or replace the current animal shelter, wants to help if it can.
But area rescue groups – which regularly receive frantic solicitations from the East Ridge shelter asking them to assume responsibility for cats and dogs there – are frankly dismayed by the prospect of still more animals being brought there from Signal Mountain.
“There is no way that East Ridge needs to be taking in animals from other towns,” said one rescuer who asked not to be identified. “They can’t even take care of the ones they get right there in their own community.”
East Ridge officials such as Mayor Mike Steele – fully aware that the size and condition of the present shelter leaves a lot to be desired – are tentatively planning to either upgrade or replace it as soon as possible. The shelter is high on the list of projects slated for funding if and when a proposed property tax increase is approved.
In the meantime, according to Mayor Steele, any animal control services provided for other communities would be extremely limited.
Residents from Signal Mountain, for example, would not be able to call the East Ridge shelter and make arrangements for strays and/or unwanted animals to be picked up. Further, they would not be able to bring animals to the shelter and drop them off there.
“The way it would work is, if a resident saw a stray animal, they would call the Signal Mountain Police,” he said. “The police would go out and get the animal and try to find the owner. If they couldn’t find out where it belonged, then they would call us and we would come and pick it up.”
At HES, Executive Director Guy Bilyeu – who has worked long and hard to improve the shelter and reduce the number of animals euthanized because nobody wanted to adopt them – is openly frustrated by the stalemate.
Starting this month – when stray and/or unwanted animals throughout the city of Chattanooga began going to McKamey Animal Care and Adoption Center rather than HES – the population at HES will decrease sharply, completely eliminating the need to euthanize healthy, adoptable animals.
“Signal Mountain needs to make a decision one way or another,” he said. “I’ve told them it doesn’t matter to me whether they contract with us or not . . . They have to decide what quality of care they want (stray and unwanted) animals from Signal Mountain to get.”
All told, he said, during 2007 more than 150 animals from Signal Mountain were either picked up on the mountain or turned in at HES headquarters in downtown Chattanooga by residents of the town.
He did not learn until recently that the town was not receiving regular reports detailing the number of animals from the community that wound up at HES as unwanted and/or strays, he said. Since then, he has made certain that complete reports were provided. (Reports for 2008 are not yet available, he noted, since HES records reflect calendar, not fiscal, years.)
Rather than quell Signal Mountain officials’ concerns, however, the HES reports exacerbated them.
Numerous complaints reported only that an HES officer had stopped by the town’s police department and signed the log. Not a single case showed that an HES officer had responded to a call about a stray, picked it up and took it back to the shelter. Instead, report after report indicated that the responding officer drove through the area, but never saw any such animal.
Most unwanted animals and/or strays that did wind up at HES were transported there by members of the public. And even though the animals were counted as being from Signal Mountain, HES reports themselves indicated that a majority of the people who turned them in were not from the town.
Of the 48 “strays” reported on HES itemized lists, for example, 36 came from addresses outside Signal Mountain. One animal, according to the HES records, was found “at foot of mountain, Shuford’s BBQ.” Another, which was DOA, reportedly came from Brainerd Road.
According to Mr. Bilyeu, the apparent discrepancies often are explained once the complete record on the animal in question is examined. For example, he said, the Brainerd Road animal from Brainerd Road was picked up by a Signal Mountain resident who took it to a veterinary clinic in the town. The vet’s office later called HES to come and pick up the body of the dog.
Many additional animals were picked up outside town limits by Signal Mountain residents who later turned them over to HES, he said.
Town officials, tired of trying to resolve their differences with HES, feel it is time to find another way to provide animal control services. After talking with East Ridge officials and touring the shelter there, they believe they have found the solution to their problem.
“It is not a large shelter, but . . . in 2007 (the town of) Signal Mountain only called the Humane Society to pick up four animals total for the year,” Town Manager Honna Rogers said. “We also only called them to come up on the mountain six times last year (although they also performed weekly rounds, East Ridge will not). We are continuing the same trend this year. I really do not feel like we are overburdening them with more animals or trips up the mountain.”
At the East Ridge shelter, workers do not dispute reports that the facility is nearly 100 percent occupied virtually all the time. Part of the reason for that, they said, is their determination not to euthanize healthy, adoptable animals.
“The reason our shelter stays so full is because people know we don't euthanize animals to make space so they will find any way to get their animals to us,” Mr. Zagona wrote in a recent email. “We have calls everyday from people outside of East Ridge wanting to surrender animals because they know the shelter(s) in their areas are ‘HIGH KILL’ . . . People are having friends that live in East Ridge surrender their animals for them . . . or they just dump the animals out within the city limits of East Ridge at night. As small as East Ridge is, we should of rounded up all the stray dogs. But daily we have calls on stray dogs, and most of these calls are coming from the areas close to Georgia and the Chattanooga lines.”
Recently, he said, an East Ridge resident saw someone from Catoosa County in Georgia dumping cats near the shelter.
“She got their tag number and we found the owner,” he said. “His reason for dumping the animals out in East Ridge was that Catoosa County would kill them!”
But trying to make sure that all healthy, adoptable animals eventually find permanent new homes is not easy, he and Officer Cooper agreed. To make that happen, East Ridge relies heavily on volunteers who take animals to the adoption center at Petsmart every weekend, and on rescue groups whose members agree to foster animals until they are adopted.
East Ridge must compete with numerous other shelters for such support, they noted, and consequently sometimes resorts to dramatic, attention-getting measures.
Early in June, for example, Mr. Zagona sent out an email to numerous rescue groups entitled “East Ridge, TN falling through the cracks EMERGENCY HELP NOW!”
“The problem is real for us, WE are FULL!” the email told rescuers. “If we can't get rescue(rs) to help, animals will be put down this week. All our (online adoption) sites are updated as always. Please, the shelter has only 16 dog runs (and) five pit bulls occupy five cages, so those are useless to combine dogs in, and some of the other kennels can't be combined because of the dog in the kennel . . . We had four pups abandoned at a local Bi-Lo this weekend, we had three supposedly stray pups turned into the shelter today and a adult Chihuahua mix turned in as a stray today. We had a mamma dog with eight pups surrendered today. Do the math, that's 16 animals just today. My volunteer had three adoptions and seven pups were rescued on Saturday . . . I am begging for help!”
Rescuers, many of whom have taken in animals from the shelter after receiving Mr. Zagona’s emails, believe it is unrealistic for East Ridge officials to try to provide humane services for animals from outside the town.
“If Signal Mountain sends its animals down there, they’re sending them there to be killed,” one longtime rescuer said flatly.
That kind of charge enrages Officer Cooper, who was employed at HES before he was hired by the East Ridge shelter three years ago.
“In the morning when I went to work at HES, I knew that I’d be killing 50 animals that day,” he said. “Since I started working for East Ridge, I haven’t had to kill 50 animals altogether.”
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