Before the deadly mauling of 81-year-old Ramon Najera rocked San Antonio’s Animal Care Services Department in February, the department’s top leaders were already having a rough year.
Despite organizational changes that brought the city department from euthanizing 50,000 animals per year to its status as a nationally recognized “no-kill” shelter in roughly two decades, the number of animals ACS euthanized was once again on the rise.
Pet adoption nationwide slowed dramatically as workers returned to the office after the pandemic, and San Antonio was no exception.
By the end of 2022, ACS’s live release rate — meaning the percentage of animals that are adopted, transferred or returned to owners — was at its lowest in seven years, 88%. That’s even as the shelter took in 32% fewer animals than it did in 2019, numbers so concerning they caught the attention of national animal welfare nonprofit Petco Love as well as shelter staff.
“Our staff is a mixture of battle-hardened and brand-new. They all love animals and this moment in history is eating us all alive and is soul crushing,” ACS Chief Operating Officer Bethany Colonnese said of the situation in a Dec. 17 email obtained by open records request and shared with the San Antonio Report.
With the department’s support, Petco Love sponsored a shelter consultant last year to assess ACS operations and help improve its live release rate. But the consultant’s observations were never presented to the ACS Advisory Board or the City Council.
Interviews and emails documenting her work shed new light on a department that in the past year has become the target of investigation by local activists, drawn the concern of state lawmakers and been given a near blank check from the City Council to improve its effectiveness.
The consultant’s findings resulted in a Petco Love executive suggesting three of ACS Director Shannon Sims’ top staffers were “toxic,” “unwilling to change” and needed to be replaced immediately, according to a letter Sims wrote to the city attorney’s office on Feb. 16. Sims contended that San Antonio-based Petco Love’s efforts were “manipulative,” “unprofessional” and singularly focused on live-release goals without regard for the department’s responsibility to provide public safety.
“The claims about ACS’s unwillingness to implement change are patently false,” Sims wrote just eight days before Najera was attacked and killed by dogs with a history of aggressive behavior. “ACS must maintain a balanced and sustainable approach to making San Antonio a safer place for people and animals.”
But subsequent deadly dog attacks and near-lethal maulings have increasingly put ACS in a defensive posture. Less than three months after City Council increased the department’s budget by 33%, Sims announced he would retire next summer.
The council, city manager and ACS Advisory Board stood steadfastly behind his leadership throughout a tumultuous year, but are now trying to figure out what the city needs in a new leader.
This year residents ranked animal issues among their top concerns in a city budget survey, with more than half of respondents indicating that Animal Care Services wasn’t meeting their needs.
ACS personnel presented their own assessment of the department’s challenges to City Council this fall — crafted with the help of a marketing agency — and secured a budget increase they say will allow a chronically underfunded department to pursue innovative solutions to San Antonio’s complex and enduring animal problem.
Meanwhile, longtime critics of the department have launched their own campaign to push ACS in a new direction.
“We need somebody who is not in-house, who is new and fresh, because [ACS] needs a lot of internal changes,” said Lea LaPort, founder of the group No Kill SATX, which advocates against shelters that euthanize animals.
LaPort is among the activists who have been inundating the department with open records requests, some of which were shared with the San Antonio Report, about spay/neuter numbers, and following dangerous dog cases through the court system. Lately, they’ve also begun presenting their work to City Council members and advisory board as evidence of leadership struggles within ACS.
“Maybe [Sims’ strategies were] a mile wide and an inch deep, or maybe it wasn’t enough time,” said Lorena Havill, a medical scientist and animal rescuer who was appointed to the advisory board in 2021 by Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2). “But we need an acute set of solutions to these problems, data-driven things that we know work from other communities.”
An outsider’s perspective
Working with San Antonio’s Animal Care Services was an unusual assignment for Kristen Hassen, who has managed several municipal animal shelters and is well-regarded within the city’s animal rescue community as a resource on how to solve challenging problems.
Unlike her firm’s usual clients, which pay roughly $25,000 for a two-month consultation, Hassen’s work at ACS was sponsored by Petco Love, which has given the department more than $3 million in grants over the past eight years.
With ACS’s numbers on an alarming negative trajectory, Petco Love CEO Susanne Kogut and Executive Director Chelsea Staley met with Sims and Colonnese in November of last year to propose Hassen’s help. Chief among her qualifications, Staley said, Hassen had experience running a shelter in Pima County, Arizona, which serves a community with a similar demographic profile to that of San Antonio.
Sims, a retired U.S. Marine, had worked his way up on the field operations side at ACS. Like his predecessor, he did not have a background in animal shelter operations, and he enthusiastically welcomed the consultant’s help, according to emails at the time.
Hassen made her first visit to the ACS campus to begin meeting staff and evaluating processes in early December 2022. That month Sims also directed ACS staff to turn over raw shelter data to Petco Love for a deep dive on department procedures and outcomes of animals entering the shelter.
While most successful shelters are set up to welcome the public and promote adoption, fostering and volunteering, Hassen said in an interview last month, San Antonio’s then 175-member team included relatively few staff members dedicated to those tasks, paired with one of the largest enforcement divisions — officers who respond to animal cruelty cases, dangerous dogs and other incidents — that she’d ever seen.
The dynamic was causing the shelter to euthanize animals for capacity almost daily, while offering a “phenomenally short” window for them to be reunited with owners or find a new home, Hassen said.
ACS’s policy is to post pictures of animals entering the shelter online immediately after an officer picks them up, starting the state-mandated 72-hour hold time before they become eligible for euthanasia. Animals that appear to have owners get a five-day hold. During that time, owners can claim their animals, and rescue groups can tag them and remove them from the ACS shelter after the hold expires.
Animals whose owners surrender them have no required hold time, meaning they’re eligible to be euthanized the day they’re brought in if kennel space is needed.
Hassen’s 14-page report submitted to ACS leaders on Dec. 12 recommended giving all relatively healthy animals at least 72 hours to find a new home, rededicating some staff to lost pet reunification and reinstating partnerships that transport animals out of state to destinations where they can be adopted. She also suggested reworking ACS’s application process to make it easier to foster pets and proposed sending ACS operations staff to visit the municipal shelter she once ran in Arizona.
“Witnessing a similar shelter (size demographic etc) will allay any disbelief that it can be done and will also clearly show the how tos to make this happen,” Sims wrote in a Dec. 19 email to Hassen.
But implementing new ideas in San Antonio proved more difficult for Hassen.
Early disagreements over Hassen’s authority prompted the Dec. 17 email from Colonnese to Petco Love calling for the partnership to slow down and review the changes before deciding whether they were compatible with the city’s public safety needs. The agreement was for Hassen to observe and submit suggestions, rather than seek to implement them in real time, she wrote.
“I can completely see how it looks from the outside, when animals are dying, that us not willing to immediately move on suggestions or ideas can feel or look like we’re not on board that something needs to change,” Colonnese wrote. “That is 100% the farthest from the truth.”
‘There could be other outcomes’
A month later, however, disagreements over best practices boiled over when the behavioralists Hassen sent to work with ACS sought to co-house dogs from different homes in the same kennels.
Hassen says the practice is successfully used by other shelters in Texas, which have fewer kennels than ACS and save many more animals. ACS contends that even if animals are vaccinated upon entering the shelter, immunity doesn’t become effective for several weeks, making co-housing a serious health hazard.
“We deal with very spreadable diseases here, like distemper, that are almost entirely fatal to animals without extensive medical care that we can’t provide,” Sims said in a Dec. 7 interview.
The animal behaviorists grew frustrated with ACS’s unwillingness to co-house animals, and ultimately sought to personally foster or find homes for animals on the euthanasia list that day. An email from Sims called the idea “highly irregular,” and advised staff even visiting experts would need to follow the department’s normal placement policies in the future.
After the disagreements with the behaviorists Sims says Staley twice asked him to fire Colonnese, along with live release manager Jessica Travis and shelter manager Heather Guthrie, according to Sims’ letter to the city attorney. Staley denies Sims’ account of their conversation, and all three employees still work at ACS.
Sims said later he decided to document ACS’s interactions with the consultant and Petco Love for the city attorney’s office because of the increasing scrutiny of the department’s operations, and because rumors about the consultant’s experience at ACS were starting to circulate among local rescue groups. In the letter he wrote that Hassen’s recommendations were “based solely on short observations and a limited number of staff interviews, and lacked professionalism.”
“What still sticks with me about San Antonio is just the number of very highly adoptable animals that are being euthanized there, when there could be other outcomes,” Hassen said last month.
Public safety vs. saving animals
Nearly a year after Hassen’s observations, Sims says ACS has actually embraced many of her recommendations. It recently restarted the out-of-state transfer program and budgeted for more staff to assist with adoptions.
But other ideas — such as keeping more animals on campus for longer periods of time — Sims viewed as unworkable because space is needed for continued intake of sick, abused and dangerous animals.
“I think there was a lack of understanding from an enforcement perspective of the scope of the problem,” Sims said of Hassen. “She was able to focus on the very specific live release aspect … and didn’t necessarily have to be concerned with intake cruelty cases, dangerous dogs — things that are obviously a high priority with City Council, with the city manager’s office as well as with the residents of San Antonio.”
ACS declined the San Antonio Report’s requests to accompany animal control officers as they respond to calls.
Hassen contends that effective shelter operations go hand-in-hand with public safety goals.
“You can both save the vast majority of animals, and you can maintain a safe, humane community and shelter,” Hassen said. “I don’t understand the message of, ‘We can’t do this, it’s impossible, we’re already doing everything we can.'”
‘Not meant to pad the numbers’
Hassen offered to continue working with ACS, but her contract was not extended after the two-month consultation. Despite plans for her to present her findings to ACS’s Advisory Board, she never got the opportunity.
Among the concerns Hassen and Petco Love hoped to bring to the board’s attention, emails to Sims and Colonnese indicate, were the results of the data analysis indicating ACS had been including animals on its “intake” list that had never stayed at the shelter.
Doing so is not a recommended practice in the industry. Hassen says her data indicated the department’s live release rate was actually about 5% lower than ACS had reported, when the 3,300 diversion cases were removed from the 26,500 total intakes.
Colonnese confirmed in a Jan. 10 email to Staley and Sims that labeling animals that never stayed at the shelter as “intakes,” though unusual, was done intentionally. ACS hoped to prove that an experimental “diversion” program — which seeks to turn community members who find pets into temporary foster parents — was working to reduce euthanasia rates. “It’s not meant to pad the numbers,” she wrote.
ACS has since ended the diversion program due to concern that foster stays might not qualify for the state’s required impound hold before animals are adopted back out, according to Colonnese.
Sims said in an interview that he didn’t recall hearing concerns about live-release data from Hassen or Petco Love. He said he asked advisory board’s executive committee if they wanted to hear directly from Hassen after her consultation ended, and they declined to put it on the agenda.
Petco Love wrote to Mayor Ron Nirenberg and the City Council in April advising them of ACS’s sinking live-release rate, and about the consultant’s failure to get a meeting with the ACS Advisory Board. Staley said she never received a response.
Among animal welfare advocates, live release rates remain a highly scrutinized metric in shelter success.
In a budget presentation this August, Sims told the council ACS’s live release rate was at 81% earlier this year, down from 88% in 2022. While that’s “not something that we’re happy about,” Sims said, ACS was still doing better than Dallas’ 75%, Fort Worth’s 73%, Houston’s 78% and El Paso’s 77%.
After the increased budget was approved, Nirenberg pointed to the department’s 44% response rate to calls about aggressive animals, animal neglect and cruelty as evidence the city needed to be “more critical” about “the metrics that we’re elevating.”
But council’s efforts to fund even more ACS staff to respond to calls about aggressive animals, animal neglect and cruelty were ultimately declined by Sims, who said it would result in thousands of more animals coming through the shelter’s doors without adequate plans in place to find them homes.
In an interview after the August budget meeting, Sims pointed to the city’s old approach of collecting tens of thousands of animals off the street with little regard for their future. Animals entering the pound received almost no adoption services, and had about a 4% survival rate, according to a 2004 Express-News report.
“I don’t want to go back to that,” Sims said. “I think we’re always going to manage intake.”
A void to fill
With his retirement now in sight, Sims counts the increased ACS budget, along with the department’s new strategic plan, as making good on commitments made when he became director.
“When I took this job my intent was, when I leave, this place is going to have the resources it needs to do its job effectively,” he said. “And I think that none of that happens without that contract between us and City Council, saying this is the plan moving forward.”
In a statement, City Manager Erik Walsh praised ACS’s new strategic plan for identifying areas of improvement, and said Sims “will play a role in ensuring a smooth transition” to the next leader.
In the meantime, animal rescue groups say the community is desperate for someone to fill the void of services.
For example, ACS no longer accepts stray animals found by members of the public unless they’re in need of critical medical attention or unless they have space at the shelter that day.
One group experiencing the results of that is the Footbridge Foundation, which places animals with fosters but doesn’t operate a shelter.
In the span of a week last month, Footbridge founder Wendy Black said her nonprofit was offered a total of $8,000 by residents who wanted her to take in animals they had found on the street. Footbridge can only accept animals when it has a foster lined up, and Black had to decline the offers.
Footbridge’s situation isn’t unique. On Thursday, Petco Love will give $1.5 million to no-kill shelter operator San Antonio Pets Alive to purchase property for a new shelter.
“Everyone is finding animals and they are desperate to get them placed,” Black said. “They don’t want to take them to ACS because everybody knows ACS will kill them.”
ACS desperately wants to change its reputation. As part of its strategic plan, it recently embraced a new organizational mission focused on improving the “ethical standard of care” for animals in San Antonio. The city is now running paid advertising on radio and TV to reinforce the idea.
Some animal rescue groups complain that approach underscores one of ACS’s biggest shortcomings: focusing all of its energy on bad actors, while alienating animal lovers who want to help more pets find homes.
“If you look at the websites, the marketing, the communications [of successful shelters], their relationship with the community is vastly different than ACS’s,” Hassen said. “They give everyone the benefit of the doubt and treat them as a helper.”
Sims acknowledges his perspective of the community’s relationship with animals is “probably skewed.”
On a recent afternoon, just one prospective adopter walked around ACS’s Westside campus, playing with a sweet, chubby dog named Gordo who was being fostered by staff member while its hair grew back from a skin irritation.
Though the man appeared thoroughly charmed by the dog’s affectionate nuzzles, it wasn’t a match, he said. He already had dogs at home, and staff told him Gordo didn’t get along with other dogs.
Many of the dogs in the kennels that day were wearing collars or bandanas they had on when they were picked up by ACS, indicating they had owners. One even wore a Christmas sweater.
ACS estimates that 93% of the city’s estimated 35,000 stray and roaming dogs have owners, but Sims said the department faces a myriad of challenges of getting those owners to vaccinate, spay and neuter and keep their animals restrained.
The department’s strategic plan calls for a major focus on addressing those issues, through advertisements letting people know it’s illegal to let dogs roam, new spay/neuter clinics in the community and staff to help pet owners in tough circumstances from needing to surrender their animals.
“I know there are probably hundreds of thousands of good solid pet owners in the city of San Antonio, the problem that we’ve got is the folks that don’t believe in that standard of care,” Sims said. “On a daily basis, I’m seeing the influx of the bad.”
