Staff Chief: Shelter Needs More Employees

FAYETTEVILLE — Washington County needs to add at least two staff positions at its animal shelter because employees are overworked, stressed and some looking for new jobs, the county judge’s chief of staff said Monday.

By The Numbers

Animal Shelter

Washington County Animal Shelter Statistics For July 1 - 27

Animal intakes

• Cats: 80

• Dogs: 78

Adopted, fostered, transported or reclaimed

• Cats: 32

• Dogs: 58

Euthanized or died at shelter

• Cats: 32

• Dogs: 22

Total adoptable animals on hand

• Cats: 102

• Dogs: 106

Source: Washington County

Dan Short, chief of staff to County Judge Marilyn Edwards, pitched the idea at the County Services Committee meeting. He wanted to see if there was enough support from justices of the peace to consider paying for those positions at future Personnel and Budget committee meetings.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do down there, and the people are spread pretty thin,” Short said. “They’re working hard, but it’s starting to have an impact.”

The county contracts a part-time veterinarian and also has seven full-time employees, including the shelter director. The seven employees worked a combined 125 hours of overtime from July 1 through July 27, according to Short’s monthly report.

Employee illnesses and days off from work add more stress to the remaining few to cover a shelter that’s open daily, Short said.

The shelter also receives man hours from county and state inmate labor for basic duties, such as kennel cleaning and walking and feeding animals. Those inmate hours were a crucial selling point when Quorum Court members deliberated construction and operation of the shelter two years ago.

However, that labor has sometimes not been available because Sheriff’s Office supervision of the inmates wasn’t possible, Short said. That meant county staff racked up extra hours to do those essential duties, he said.

“Sometimes you run into the situation where we’ve got our director or assistant director working the weekends and cleaning up poop because of a problem that we don’t have any control over,” Short said.

The shelter’s clinic also requires a lot of man hours, said Lib Horn, a shelter consultant for the county and former Fayetteville Animal Shelter director. Staff not assigned to work in the clinic are often helping with cleanup after surgeries to keep the area sterile, she said.

He got the verbal go-ahead from several of the justices of the peace to begin putting together estimates to pay for a full-time veterinarian and vet technician. No action was taken by the committee.

The county budgets $33,696 for the current vet technician, according to the shelter’s budget.

Short proposed using the county’s $40,000 budget that pays for the spay and neuter program for low-income residents to offset an estimated $95,000 to pay for a full-time vet that includes salaries and benefits.

The program pays veterinarians throughout the county to do the spay and neuter procedures for low-income residents. That work could be done in-house by a full-time veterinarian, Short said.

“You want to stop a lot of these ills we talked about? Pass a comprehensive spay and neuter ordinance that requires people to spay and neuter their animals,” Justice of the Peace Candy Clark said. “That’ll do it. That is why we ship animals to Colorado and the east because they’ve done that and they don’t have animals in their shelters. So they take ours because we’re the ones popping them out like crazy.”

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