This story has been updated.
A plan to spend $2.85 million increasing staff to respond to critical calls at the city’s Animal Care Services Department in the coming fiscal year was knocked down by the department’s leader and city manager Wednesday, amid concerns about the city’s ability to fill those roles.
The 2024 city budget council approved Thursday increases ACS’s budget by roughly 33% over the previous year’s approved budget — a larger increase than any other city department, and something ACS leaders have suggested is long overdue.
“The proposed budget already includes 29 new positions that we need to fill [at ACS],” City Manager Erik Walsh said Wednesday at a work session ahead of that vote. “While I understand the [council’s] desire to get to everything all at once, logistically, I’m not sure I can we can deliver on that over the course of one year.”
The suggestion to strike additional funding at the work session drew sharp criticism from some of ACS’s most most outspoken supporters on the council, who have long argued that the department’s shortcomings were due to chronic underfunding.
After a deadly dog mauling in February, city leaders say they learned ACS only responds to about 44% of the roughly 55,000 of the so-called “critical calls” it receives per year, which includes calls related to aggressive dogs, neglect and animal cruelty. (Dog bites are handled by a separate team.)
The city’s proposed 2024 budget included $1.1 million for eight new ACS positions to handle critical calls, which the department said would improve its response rate to 64% in the coming fiscal year, beginning Oct. 1. It would continue to add staff to reach a 100% response rate by 2026.
The department’s total approved budget for the 2024 fiscal year is $28.5 million.
City Council members who’ve been inundated with pleas from the public to address problems with stray and aggressive animals deemed those goals unacceptable and proposed their own plan to help the department get to a 100% response rate in the coming fiscal year.
As part of the city’s budget amendment process this week Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) asked the city to fund an additional 14 positions at ACS to address critical calls in 2024, at a cost of $2.28 million for the next two years.
The idea was discussed at a budget work session Tuesday and deemed high on the list of last-minute budget additions that had enough council support for staff to pursue it using surplus CPS Energy revenue.
On Wednesday, however, ACS Director Shannon Sims told members of the council that even with the additional funding, his department wouldn’t be able to fill the new roles for at least another year.
“We’d have to train roughly about 35 to 40 officers in this coming year, which would be exceptionally difficult,” Sims told the council.
If the department was somehow able to do that, Sims continued, the city has only ordered enough vehicles to accommodate the current budget proposal, not the additional positions. Additionally, animals impounded by the additional officers could tank the city’s already struggling live release rate, Sims said, and cause the city to institute a shorter hold time before euthanizing an impounded animal.
“This would basically be 17,000 additional animals that we would be impounding every single year,” Sims said of the council’s plan to add another 14 officers for critical calls.
“Without the ability to also expand our live-release capabilities, our treatment capabilities and things of that nature, there’s a possibility this could decrease our live release rate down from 80%, where we’re at right now, to somewhere in the 50s,” he said.
Walsh suggested cutting the council’s proposed additional $2.28 million for ACS down to $825,000, which he said could fund additional positions starting in summer of 2025, depending on the department’s progress.
That modified proposal was approved by City Council on Thursday along with a list of other last-minute amendments to the 2024 budget.
Asked whether he was confident that the funding increase would be enough to address a recent string of incidents involving aggressive dogs, Walsh said, “No, what’s needed is responsible pet ownership.”
“We can enforce [animal laws], we can adopt, we can spay [and] neuter,” he said. “But the vast majority of the stray dogs that we see are owned animals, and so we need people to be responsible pet owners. The city will not be able to do that.”
An organizational chart of ACS’s staff showed dozens of open positions at the department last month, including 15 field officers.
Sims declined to be interviewed after Wednesday’s meeting.
His comments at the budget work session frustrated some members of the council, however, who said the department should have proposed using the money differently if staffing critical call positions wasn’t feasible.
“One of the challenges I’m having is that it feels like there’s always a barrier to doing the thing that we need to do, but we don’t propose that that barrier be alleviated,” McKee-Rodriguez said at the end of that meeting.
“Whether it’s the one-time expenses like the vehicles, whether it’s adding [an animal] trainer … I’d rather see us address that,” than cut the additional funding, he said.
Among the ideas council voted to incorporate in the budget Thursday was the creation of two ACS storefronts to perform spay-and-neuter surgeries, one on the East Side and one of the West Side, at a cost of roughly $2 million.
While some members were excited about that idea Wednesday, Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran (D3), another of ACS’s usual allies on the dais, said she wasn’t optimistic about the impact it would make, considering a spay-and-neuter facility at Brooks City Base has been vacant for more than a year.
The Brooks facility is one of two city-owned clinics that ACS planned to allow private veterinary companies to occupy for free for several years to help them break into the San Antonio market, and to help the city deliver free and low-cost spay and neuter services. But the city has struggled to find a new partner for the clinic at Brooks after the previous tenant’s agreement with the city produced fewer than expected surgeries.
“We have not met our numbers, that’s a cold hard fact, of the spay and neuters that we are supposed to do,” Viagran said. “I don’t like to set expectations for the council and their residents that 30 to 50 [spay-and-neuter surgeries] are going to happen per day [from the new facility] when they’re just not going to happen.”
