Jul 23, 2020 Animal Shelter Advisory Committee on 2020-07-23 2:00 PM

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you all for joining us virtually today for our meeting. I just want to go over a few housekeeping rules with everyone since this is our first time doing a virtual meeting as a group. If you can, keep yourself on mute unless you are talking. Diana is going to lead the meeting so anytime you want to make a statement, just please raise your hand and she will watch for that and call on you to make the statement. And we do ask if you have your camera off that you do turn it back on when you are talking so that we can get that recorded. Do y'all have any questions before we start on anything? No? Awesome. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Diana. Hi everybody. Good afternoon. I'm going to call the meeting to order. This is July 23, 2020, 2 o'clock. City of Denton Animal Shelter Advisory Board meeting. First thing we'll do is ask for approval of the last minutes. So if someone would make a motion to approve those minutes. Thank you, Ann. I'll make a motion to approve. Thank you. And John, were you going to second? Thank you very much. Okay. Brandy. Okay, we are going to jump right into it. I know we haven't had a meeting in a while due to COVID. So we have a lot to cover today. I'm kind of excited to go over what we have to cover today as well. So as usual, we're going to go ahead and go over some stats. And as I go through these, you will see that I have added some additional stats for us to review. And as I go down there, I will kind of let you know those are the ones that I've added. So, so far for 19-20, we have had 2007 adoptions, our return to owners 531 and our transfers of 75. Our TNR program has been amazing. We've had 15 successful cats placed in our shelter colony. These are one of the new sets that I am going to be reporting to y'all, which are our animals that have either died in our foster care, shelter or vet because of being sick. So the sick that have died in foster care, we've had 14 cats and one dog for a total of 15. Sick who have died in shelter, we've had six cats and five dogs for a total of 11 and six that have died at the vet. And that we've had three cats, one dog for four total. Our requests for euthanasia, we have had a total of 76. And our euthanasia for untreatable and unmanageable, 104 cats, 139 dogs and 260 total. We've had 3,098 intakes and I'm proud to announce that our live release rate, even with COVID and everything, has risen 3% and we are at a 91% live release rate. Some of our lobby sets that we have, our call volume has increased drastically since we did put the shelter in place originally in March. That's because of us moving towards that appointment only based adoption and owner surrender business model that we have. So, so far this year we've been presented with 26,000, little over 26,000 calls. Our voicemail percentage is 33%, which I will highlight is a 5% decrease from where we were this time last year. And our walk-in traffic, as you see, the trend did go down because we did have to shutter our doors. So we're averaging out about 37,000. And then our volunteer hours. I did want to showcase that because in February we had reached an all-time high of 957 volunteer hours. However, we did have to suspend the program due to the COVID shelter in place. And right now we're a little over 4,000 hours. So still an impressive number. And we are ready to get everyone up and running again with our volunteers. And for our field, we have ran a little over 4,600 calls this fiscal year. This just highlights the top calls that we've ran, our stray call being the most calls that we've ran with 439. And I did also want to highlight that we also take requests through the Engage Ditten app, if you're familiar with that. And we've taken 229 requests through that app. And some shelter updates that I did want to go over. Our COVID response being the main one. I know I did send out some communications to you all throughout this process to kind of keep you informed as to what we were doing as a shelter for our COVID response. We did have to shut our doors down. And like I said, we moved to that appointment only business model for our adoptions and owner surrenders and stray surrenders. We are still doing the appointment only right now. However, we are taking direction from when we are able to open. So right now that is still working for us to get the animals out of the shelter successfully. Addition to that, we've added a new doctor, Dr. Brandon. He is from SPCA. We are very excited to have him on board. He brings a wealth of knowledge from his years of practicing. He's already acclimated to our shelter beautifully. And he's also bringing some different things that we are able to incorporate into our shelter. One of those things is that we are going to be able to start neutering kittens, male kittens at two pounds instead of the 2.5 pounds that we usually were waiting for. This allows them to get out of that shelter or foster care quicker and into their forever home. In addition to that, he also does spay and neuters for rabbits. So that is something that we are going to actually work out with him. We have a meeting set in August and we're going to write out a protocol in order to start spay and neutering and also vaccinating the domestic rabbits that we do receive into the shelter. In addition to that, we have hired a part-time kennel technician to help out in the shelter. Kelvin started four days ago. He is excited to be here and jump in and help where he can. And also, we are hiring a part-time CSR who is slated to start in a week. We are in the process of adopting our 2021 budget. What we have actually asked for this year, we are going to get some additional cameras added into the facility. Some of those cameras are going to go into our small dog yard, some in our vet clinic, and then some in the hallways so that we are able to see kind of holistically what's going on in the shelter. Also, we will be looking at possibly adding another position, a full-time ACO, into the operation as well. One of the great things I do want to highlight is our SIT program, our supervisor in training. If you remember, this was introduced back in October. Nicole Hire was our first SIT program participant. She actually graduated in June. She has a great project that she's actually working on that's going to help us with stray surrenders in the shelter. She's still in the infancy stages of getting that rolled out. But when we come back for our next meeting, I will have her here to kind of give you all an update of what she's working on, how she's gained some insight from this program, and what she's ready to do for our shelter from what she's learned. For our volunteer program, we have moved to a system that is called VOMO. This system allows volunteers to schedule their time with us. We also use it for our fosters as well. It's a robust system. The volunteers that we have already incorporated back into the shelter actually love it. Our fosters love it because they are able to schedule their kittens when they need to receive shots, when they need to see a vet. If their kitten might have diarrhea, they can go in there and schedule a vet appointment. Our vet staff and GALA, our volunteer coordinator, they see the schedule real time, and they are able to successfully get those fosters in and out. We weren't using this system last year. We didn't have a volunteer coordinator last year, and this has only enhanced our foster program as well. As far as our foster program, we have successfully placed 78 kittens in our foster program since May, and that's between 25 homes. Having the VOMO system in place has been awesome in managing those volunteers. Now, we still have about 70 kittens inside of the shelter. However, having that robust foster program, we are definitely seeing the benefits of that. Lastly, I wanted to touch on Clear the Shelter. As you know, last year we participated in Clear the Shelter. We had a successful Clear the Shelter with 92 animals being adopted. However, with COVID being on the forefront of everything, we did have to kind of take a look over the Clear the Shelter and how we did it last year versus how it's going to look this year. So we are going to still have the appointment-only system, and what we're going to do is move from just having one day as Clear the Shelter to having a few days with half-off adoptions, and then a few days of doing the free animal adoptions. It won't be advertised as heavily as it was last year, but we still will be doing the screening for adoptions like we did last year. So after that, I'm going to go ahead and open it up for any questions. Randy, when will we be able to see the budget? So on August the 4th, I actually give a presentation to Council with the budget. Okay, we'll be able to see it before then, or helping you ask for more money, that type of thing. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, what we've asked for, and I'll just give you some background, due to COVID, we did have to scale back, and that's every department, on what we needed to ask for. I'm just happy to report that, you know, executive staff knows how critical animal services is, and the operation is, and kind of where we were budget-wise, even a year ago. So we have not, the things that we've asked for, as far as line items, it's mainly for supplies in the shelter. We want to make sure that we're adequately funded for that, and also for animal food. That was our biggest one, because as you know, we started feeding the kittens rural canine, which is an expensive food, and so we wanted to make sure that we could continue that level of care for the animals. So that's really what we focused on, as far as inside the shelter for budget this year. Okay, so if there's anything that you need for us to lobby for, or is there any kind of wish list that you have? Well, actually, the Animal Support Foundation has reached out to me, and we are compiling a list right now of those, I like to call them big ticket items. We are actually compiling a list right now of what we need, and they have a meeting in August that Betty's going to bring it forth for approval for us. Okay, one suggestion I have is, when you do that, get with us so that we can share it out on social media to promote DASF, to get them donations. Okay, I definitely will. Do we have any other questions before I continue? Sorry, I think I had emailed you too. Do we have an update on the tethering ordinance? Yes, we do. So, as y'all know, that's something that we've been working on like for a year. And in February, we actually had it finalized with y'all's approval. And unfortunately, I'm just going to admit, COVID hit, and any counter request that we had got sidelined, because COVID reporting was the only thing that was allowed. So just recently, they have opened it up for departments to start presenting and submitting items for consideration aside from COVID. So what we did was kind of take a step back and say, really, what kind of form of plan or what we want to do, because the focus of this next budget year, we want to do a deep dive in our ordinance review, and that's all of our ordinances. So we've already looked at the tethering, gotten that approved by y'all. The dangerous dog addition verbiage, y'all looked at as well and approved. And we're also looking at updating our barking dog complaint ordinance. We want to add some timeframes in there and an affidavit for the residents to fill out. And our goal is to package that all together and bring those three fourths together. And that's how we're going to kind of do all the ordinances. So that way we're getting, I'm not having to go like every week to get one done. So the next step in that is we're going to send those out to legal. They're going to have to review and make sure that what we have, have the final say on that. And once they do, we'll move forth with getting that put on the council agenda. Okay, thanks. Randy, are you going to partner with them to work on your ordinances because they've got pretty much everything already written? Who did you say, Dan? I'm sorry. Texas Humane Legislative Network. Yes, we actually did reach out to them for the tethering ordinance and the dangerous dog language, because what our goal is, is to make sure that we are in line with what the state of Texas has, and also the legislators. So we're keeping a close eye on that. Ethel Straw, our field supervisor, she's heavily involved in that. So she's kind of our resource to reaching out and having them kind of look over and kind of giving suggestions before we bring it forth for y'all to give the suggestions as well. Okay. I have one more question, if no one does. So, I mean, I'm looking at your volunteer hours. Obviously, since you had to close, that's a significant drop in volunteer. So is it just, is staff having to work overtime? How are you covering that loss? So staff is not having to work any additional overtime than they usually were pulling in. What we've done, since our intake has been down a little bit, because we're not having that full service, just walk up and drop off, and we have that appointment only, we've been able to manage the capacity. Therefore, you know, staff has been able to manage. I'm going to be completely transparent these past few weeks, you know, it is summer, you know, if someone comes to our door, we are not turning them away, of course, we are taking it in, it's kitten season, and they have been a little stretched in. However, we got approval to hire the part time. And that's why we brought them in as well. But we have started to incorporate the volunteers in on an appointment basis. And it's four volunteers a day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. So they are helping to fill in those gaps when they can. But unfortunately, everyone is not comfortable coming back. And that's okay, we understand. So the ones that do like they'll do dishes and laundry, or they'll come in and some of them have helped with kennel care as well. But we're kind of leaving it up to them when they're comfortable come back. Okay, thanks. Me again, we haven't talked in so long. What can we do to help bolster the foster home aspect because I just started a new program with wild rescue for the domestics. And so far, it's working really well. Charlie, you're a wiz at this. Is there anything we can do social media wise to put a message out there to say, Hey, that needs help. We have 78 kittens. Don't you want a kitten to foster, you know, so that we can share it out on social media? You know, so I'm sorry. Okay. So, Galen Nelson, the volunteer coordinator is who we would who we can actually partner with that network. What we do we are our fosters, they have gone through like a two week training is it was and this is before COVID hit, they had to come to the shelter twice. And it's a training that we it was a new training that they had to go through. Because with kitten care, you know, they are very, very fragile. And it's hard for people to kind of understand it first. It's like, oh, a new kitten is exciting, but they don't understand what all kind of goes into it. So if we do move that route, I would just ask that we take a slower approach with it because I would like to have that education and make sure that they are right fit to foster. Oh, I totally agree. I'm doing all my training by zoom. Yeah. So they can see everything. And of course, my vets on board with this too. But there are there seems to be more people out there right now who really want to help. You know, because they they're homebound, right? We're stay at home. So let's talk to Gaila about and Charlie about Yeah, we definitely will connect and go ahead and see what we can do because we always we welcome them because once you know, some fosters just want the bottle babies and some just want the wing baby. So we're about to hit that second wave of kitten season. So we know the bottle babies are coming again and we don't want you know, some people have stepped back and was like, you know, I did it once, you know, I just don't think it's for me and that's okay. So we do want to keep that list robust where we can call on someone for either one of those. Yes, if if a virtual option for training or in person training becomes accessible again, if there's any help need and getting the word out. I'm always available to internet the things. Thank you. Yeah, we definitely will sit down. Diana, Charlie and Gaila has been out for a week, but when she comes back, just go ahead and kind of make a plan like I said, because that that second wave is coming. It's going to hit us fast, you know, before before we know it. So we want to be prepared. One thing I did want to share with y'all is, I don't know if y'all are familiar with Albon, Albon, I'm sorry, I said that wrong protocol. We've actually seen a 20% increase, and I know I shared the numbers with the animals that are that were sick and died in the shelter last year. Majority of those were kittens, you know, because they they fail, they can fail overnight. So we did a lot of research on what we could do in house in order to save those kittens. And we started the Albon process. And that's five dosages that they get when they come into the shelter. And I'm just going to go ahead and say it we have seen an extreme increase of our success rate of those kittens. There's hardly no diarrhea. We've also started feeding them and I lost the name of it's a powder that we started putting on their food. It's like an amino acid that helps with their intestines to an immune system. And it has made a world of wonders. And we have already seen about a 20% increase of survival rate with our kittens because of that that protocol. We're also weighing them more frequent. So if they are declining in weight, we're catching that sooner than we were this time last year. So that's why we have so many kittens. It's a good thing. Are you using the Albon prophylactically? So when they come in, they get started on it? Yes. Yes, ma'am. Awesome. I'm very proud of you. I know that was a long road coming too. But I'll bet Dr. Brandon helped with that protocol. Actually, our kennel technician, Roxy Burson. Roxy. Yeah, she's the one who did the research and brought it brought it to us. And we call her the kitten queen there because, you know, a lot of the things that the initiatives that have started were because of her. I'm not going to take the credit for it at all. It was all because of her. Well, what's interesting is, and we've been trying to get that protocol here for how many years, because that's what we do in in other cities and in the wildlife world, too. So I'm thrilled. Good for you guys. Thank you. Does anybody have any more questions? Well, I'm excited to see to see all y'all. And thank you for being patient with us throughout this whole process, you know, and if y'all have any questions with anything, I mean, y'all know where to reach me. And I try to keep y'all in the loop with everything as it's happening, especially the hoarding cases that we've had and, you know, the success we've had on those. I was telling Sarah this morning, we've had three, you know, hoarding cases, as y'all know, you know, cats, dogs, and the small and furries. And we actually helped Denton County with one last week as well. And, you know, we've been very successful partnering with Humane Society of North Texas and Animal Investigation Response on getting those animals placed, especially now when we can so easily hit capacity, they're taking those animals off of us and and helping us out. So we're very grateful for those partnerships as well. And the last thing I do want to do is introduce our new department head Sarah Keekler. She is our Chief of Staff for the City of Denton. She actually became over our department on Monday, officially, and she's very excited to join and I'm going to kind of turn it over to her if she wants to introduce herself and say hello. Sure, just wanted to say hi to everyone. I'm really excited to be working with Animal Services. I've heard wonderful, wonderful things about what Randy and her team are doing, especially over the last year or so. So I really look forward to learning their operations and really I see myself as support for them and the team, many initiatives and continuous improvements that they have to, you know, for the well-being of the animals in our community, as well as the persons in our community who love those animals. So I'm really excited for this opportunity and really excited to be working with Randy and her team. Got the chance to meet some of the team this morning and really just great people that I mean we really have some great employees out there and please let me know if I can ever be of assistance to you. Just one more question, Randy. Are the air conditioners up and working on all the trucks now? Yes, ma'am. They are officially working. So we have no hot animals in the back of the animals anymore. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, my friends, I think that's all we have for today. And who would like to make a motion to dismiss the meeting? I would like to point out this is unimportant, but for record keeping sake, my last name is misspelled on the official agenda. I don't know who to tell that to, but I think this is, I'm not Charlie Hunger. I mean, I am because I skipped lunch, but that's, you know, that's my own fault. I apologize. I'm new to this group and trying to get acquainted with all of the names and the roles that everyone plays. I've had four public meetings this month and scrambling to learn the whole virtual input requirements. And if I don't get anything right, I should get your name correct. I will make sure that's correct. It's the easier one. My wife was on a different committee when we got married before we got married. Her last name was Helgeson. She's just like that was never, never, never right. I apologize. I will get it corrected for you. Thank you so much. No biggie. Then I guess I can make a motion to adjourn because I'm already running my mouth. May I have a second? I'll second. Thank you, Anne. All right. Thank you, everybody. Have a great rest of the day. Good to see you all.