Local governments ponder more money for animal shelters 

The German Shepherd appeared to be young, as was the woman trying to relinquish the dog at the Henderson Animal Shelter. 

“I don’t live in Henderson, so they wouldn’t take him,” she said as she put the dog back in her car. “He’s gentle but he lunged at a lady’s garbage bag. My landlord says he has to go.”  

With 50 kennels full of adoptable dogs – almost exclusively big breeds such as Shepherds, Siberian Huskies, and Pit Bulls – Henderson says there’s no room at the shelter for animals from other jurisdictions. 

It’s a scene repeated daily since last year when the valley’s other government-funded shelter, the Animal Foundation (TAF), began requiring appointments, sometimes as far as three months out, to relinquish stray or owned animals, resulting in a flood of abandoned and lost pets on the loose, and pleas for action from already overburdened shelters, rescues and citizens. 

Inflation, the high cost of housing, rental deposits and fees for pets are rendering pet ownership a bastion of the upper class.

“We’ve had people calling us from the lobby of the Animal Foundation to come over just to surrender the animals to us,” says Lori Hereen of the Nevada Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA), which is not required, as TAF and Henderson are, to accept animals from the public. But a long-simmering crisis at TAF boiled over last year when the shelter stopped accepting dogs for more than a month because of a contagious disease, placing additional strain on other facilities, rescues, and volunteers to capture, provide medical care, and find homes for stray and abandoned dogs and cats.  

“When an animal is going to get dropped off, if they have to wait two months, that’s really not a drop off,” says Clark County Manager Kevin Schiller, who along with his bosses, the county commissioners, has been fielding calls from citizens outraged by TAF’s failure to maintain an open shelter, as required by its contract. “In reality, there’s various ways that that ends. The owners give up on the animal. The animal becomes a stray. It kind of just defeats the purpose of trying to vet intake.”

Schiller says the county, Las Vegas and North Las Vegas are considering increasing funding for TAF, which receives $4.7 million annually from the municipalities. The proposal is likely to meet with resistance from animal advocates who appreciate the need for additional funding, but think it’s wasted on TAF.

“It’s throwing good money after bad as long as the current management remains intact,” said Gina Griesen of Nevada Voters for Animals.

TAF CEO Hilarie Grey did not respond to requests for an interview.

TAF has been slow to address its shortcomings. With intakes up 30% year-to-year, the shelter euthanized twice as many dogs last year as in 2021.

Its Community Cats program, designed as a way to save feral cats from being euthanized, is now an easy means of disposing of even adoptable cats, known by neighbors in some cases to be abandoned. 

“They’ve been miserably inept for a very long time and I keep expecting them to just collapse under their own weight, but they’ve got a whole lot of high powered people propping them up,” says Keith Williams, founder of the Community Cat Coalition of Clark County (C5), which traps, neuters, and releases thousands of cats a year, reducing the shelter’s intake and euthanasia rates. 

The shelter is losing money – $1.5 million in 2021, according to its tax return. Of its six highest-paid employees in 2021, five were administrators and one was a veterinarian.

It now has “four vets and two more in consideration and all of our certified and wonderful animal activists,” TAF board member Jan Jones, a former mayor of Las Vegas, told the Current.    

‘Dogs in our bathrooms’

Given government inaction thus far, the stray and abandoned animal crisis has fallen to the public.   

“We have dogs in our bathrooms. We have dogs in our garages. We have friends keeping dogs,” Doggie Task Force volunteer Tracy Paz told the Clark County Commission last month. The rescues she works with have caught and taken in countless animals since TAF stopped taking pets on demand. “We literally have nowhere for these animals to go.” 

The notion of giving more money to TAF is anathema to a small but mighty army of rescuers who say they have had to clean up TAF’s mess, raising money and using their savings to provide medical care to animals TAF would otherwise euthanize.

“I think that’s the biggest concern from rescues,” says Julie Lane, who works in the hospitality industry but moonlights as a volunteer cat trapper. In the last week she spent $25 on canned cat food and $75 on gas for two trapping projects involving kittens. She says it’s financially, emotionally and physically exhausting. 

“TAF should donate money to a rescue that pulls a pet for medical needs,” she says. “It’s not fair to the rescue to take on the burden because TAF can’t or won’t help the pet.”

TAF’s contract, last renewed in 2020 for five years, grants it less than a third of the government funding of some shelters in comparable markets, such as the publicly funded shelter in San Antonio, Texas, which has a similar intake to TAF of about 24,000 animals a year. In 2021, the San Antonio shelter received $16.1 million in government funding.

Schiller didn’t say how much the local governments may augment TAF’s funding or what share may be allocated to rescues. 

“We also have to know that there’s going to be an outcome tied to increasing that funding – so an executable plan,” he said. 

That plan features a prominent role for rescues, some of which have criticized TAF, fallen out of favor with the shelter, and been removed from its transfer list.   

Schiller says any reluctance on TAF’s part to work with rescues “may affect the contract. Rescues are critical to the case continuum. I don’t think you can have one without the other. You can’t have the intake and not increase the capacity on the rescue side.”

LV Councilwoman Victoria Seaman, who wants the city to operate its own shelter, is vehemently opposed to more funding for TAF. 

Former Congresswoman Shelley Berkley, who is running against Seaman in the LV mayor’s race, says she favors additional funding as long as elected officials are given seats on TAF’s board of directors. 

Activists suggest animal advocates have a place on the board. 

“Elected officials come and go,” said Griesen of Nevada Voters for Animals. “We’re here to stay.” 

Councilman Cedric Crear, also a mayoral candidate, did not respond to requests for comment. 

Henderson: A ‘premier’ city? 

Volunteers at the Henderson shelter say even before TAF’s meltdown, their facility lacked necessities, such as adequate enclosures for animals, a sink to wash food bowls, or a commercial grade washing machine to launder bedding. They’re pleading with the city council to fund a new shelter and augment staff.

“Our shelter is understaffed, in complete disrepair and represents a safety hazard not only to our workers but to our animals,” volunteer Scott McIntyre told the council last month, adding volunteers provided the equivalent of ten full-time staff members in the last year – a savings to the city of $675,000, he said.   

Structural deficiencies in the shelter, some potentially hazardous, such as open vents to the exterior are “causing heat and cooling to be vacuumed out of the building,” says volunteer Kenny Burdette. In the event of a fire, she said, “vacuuming of the air would be just like throwing gas on the fire. These dogs are left unattended 12 hours every single night with no one to care for them should anything happen.” 

The city spends about $2 million a year on the shelter, including $1 million for full time employees, an amount that has been unchanged for at least the last eight years.  

Henderson spent $21 million last year maintaining its parks, including more than 20 for dogs.  

The Henderson shelter is a “prison for animals,” according to volunteer Karen Solberg, who told the council volunteers are so integral to animals’ well-being, she puts her feelings aside and remembers “that I’m there for the animals and try not to think about the conditions that they’re living in.” 

Henderson fancies itself a ‘premier’ community. But volunteers say its outdated animal shelter is nothing to crow about.  

• It has no spay and neuter services for the public, and lacks full-time veterinary care three days a week. 
• The dogs are kept in small outdoor kennels year-round, and a plexiglass-like covering obscures would-be adopters’ views of the animals.  
• Only one of three play areas has grass. The others are dirt. 

“If you really want to be America’s premier community, you should be focused on the things that people care about, which will include making Henderson a safer city for animals, whether in the shelter or otherwise,” volunteer Laura Guimond told the council, citing “enormous amounts of money have been spent on things that don’t really make much of a difference,” such as $42 million (half of the funding) for Dollar Loan Center Arena, a minor league sports facility with limited access for the public, and $32 million for land at the site of the former Fiesta Casino for another indoor sports facility. 

“Imagine what that money or even a fraction of it could have done to improve the lives of homeless animals in Henderson,” Guimond told the council. 

“I believe their funding needs to be increased,” says Henderson Councilwoman Carrie Cox, who says the city is looking at budgeting for a new shelter. “It won’t be this year but maybe next.” 

Marking territory

The Henderson shelter’s refusal to take dogs from outside its jurisdiction is emblematic of the decades-old practice of siloing government services in Southern Nevada by municipality.  

Efforts to consolidate governments and their services have met with opposition from turf-protective officials.  

County Commissioner Tick Segerblom suggests animal shelters share a dispatch system, such as that used by fire departments, that would direct animal control officers and the public to the nearest shelter, regardless of place of residency. 

“It really should be a regional approach, with satellite offices so that you can ease the overcrowding when it hits, and you have to shut down an entire shelter because an illness starts to spread,” says former Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani. “We touched on that back in 2008 when I got a taskforce to work on it. Henderson refused to participate, which was part of the problem.” 

“It’s certainly worth looking at,” says Williams of C5, if only to encourage valleywide enforcement of spay and neuter ordinances. “There’s a market for about 20,000 to 30,000 cats a year in Southern Nevada. We’re looking at 400,000 kittens born on the streets this spring,” says Williams. “Tell me how you adopt your way out of that.” 

Schiller was unable to say what, if anything, the county is doing to enforce the spay and neuter ordinance. Henderson’s shelter director Danielle Harney, declined to be interviewed about that city’s spay and neuter protocol.  

Cox of Henderson says she’s not sure she’d support a regional approach. 

“The larger you become in government services, the harder it is to make sure they’re done effectively,” she says. “I’d be very concerned, seeing what’s happened at the Animal Foundation.”