Little changes at Indy's understaffed, sometimes squalid animal shelter

For more than a decade, Indiana's largest animal shelter has failed to provide for the most basic needs of the 17,000 animals entrusted to its care each year.

From time to time, well-meaning people come together and try to fix the problems. Task forces are assembled. Studies are conducted. Solutions are found. But the city of Indianapolis has never implemented them.

A 2003 task force called for better medical care, more staffing and clearer euthanasia procedures at Animal Care and Control. A report commissioned this year by the Department of Public Safety found that little has changed.

The lone veterinarian position has been vacant since March, and because of a shortage of staff, decisions to kill a wounded animal are routinely made without even a basic medical workup. To meet bare minimum standards, the study found, the kennel staff needs to double.

Conditions have become so dire that the report's authors suggest the shelter may even be in violation of the city's own animal cruelty ordinances.

An Indianapolis Star review found that Indianapolis Animal Care and Control is dramatically understaffed compared with similar facilities in the region. And despite broad agreement that improvements are needed, efforts to make them have repeatedly fallen apart when it comes time to pay for them.

Administration officials and some City-County Council members blame the problems on budget constraints in a city that has seen revenue plummet because of property tax caps and the national recession.

But animal welfare groups and others on the council say that explanation obscures the true culprit. A city that spends more than $350 million a year on public safety, they say, has never made animal care a priority.

"We've known this since at least 2000," said Sue Hobbs, chair of an advisory board that oversees Animal Care and Control. "There have been committees and studies and panels, and nothing ever changes. It just doesn't. It's seriously like Groundhog's Day."

'How ironic it is'

The shelter at 2600 S. Harding St. is required by law to take unwanted, abused and neglected animals, as well as strays.

At any given time, the shelter's 12 animal care technicians tend to the needs of 500-plus animals. Forget about walking the dogs — the latest study shows the shelter needs twice that number just to tend to basic needs, such as feeding them and cleaning cages, according to minimum standards established by the Association of Shelter Veterinarians.

Each cage receives a full scrub once a day — often using bleach and rags that volunteers bring from home. Later, there's a follow-up visit to scoop poop before the employees leave for the day at 6:30 p.m. Overnight, the animals are left unsupervised, and it shows the next morning.

During an 11 a.m. weekday visit by The Indianapolis Star, several dog cages remained littered with feces from overnight, and urine had pooled in one of the aisles. The shelter smelled about like what you would expect.

Animal welfare advocates describe the staff as caring and hardworking but overwhelmed.

They've been leaderless since April, when Dan Shackle became the 10th director in 12 years to resign. The only full-time veterinarian in the shelter's recent history moved out of state in March, and a replacement hasn't been found.

To make ends meet, Animal Care and Control relies heavily on volunteers, who are on pace to log 19,477 hours this year. That's roughly the workload of nine full-time employees.

Without them, Hobbs said, "laundry wouldn't get done, cat litter pans wouldn't get washed, dogs wouldn't get walked, adoption events wouldn't get staffed. It would be a debacle, basically."

Other government-run shelters in the region are better equipped, particularly on the medical side. Louisville, Ky., and the Franklin County shelter in Columbus, Ohio, employ a full-time veterinarian with a supporting medical staff of at least five employees. Indianapolis, which sheltered at least 5,000 more animals last year than either of them, doesn't budget for any veterinary technicians or assistants.

Among the regional cities surveyed, only Chicago had more animals per shelter employee in 2014 than Indianapolis. But Chicago still provides two full-time vets with a six-member veterinary staff.

But most damning in the recent report is the suggestion that conditions at the shelter may violate the city's own animal cruelty ordinances.

City code requires food "in adequate amounts to maintain good health." The city doesn't budget for food at all, instead relying on a hodgepodge of donations that veterinarians say is detrimental to the animals' well-being.

Additionally, "there's no budget for emergency care and this, the team members believe, is contrary to local laws on humane care," the report said. "With lack of budgeting for emergency medical care, IACC staff is forced to make euthanasia decisions without adequate diagnostic information, such as X-ray and bloodwork results."

The law requires animal owners to provide proper medical care and to segregate animals when they are sick to prevent the spread of disease. But the study, conducted this summer, found that poor sanitation and the lack of a quarantine area presented a high risk for disease. In October, a deadly viral outbreak killed two dozen cats before animal rescue groups took the remaining cats away to prevent its spread.

"The city is charged to investigate cruelty," said John Aleshire, CEO of the Humane Society of Indianapolis. "How ironic it is that we would bring an animal back to a shelter that is not properly staffed, that does not have proper medical care and (where) the staff has to scrounge around for food."

Funds limited

Valerie Washington, deputy director of the Department of Public Safety, which oversees Animal Care and Control, agrees that better care is needed.

The search for a new leader is ongoing, and she plans to convert the full-time vet position to a part-time one at the same salary in order to fill it. She hopes to add at least three vet techs to the budget, plus a $150,000 line item for food, she said. (For context, Louisville spent $579,000 on food last year.)

That is, of course, if additional funds come through. Washington, council members and animal welfare advocates are optimistic that the city will fund the recommendations incrementally beginning in 2015.

So what took so long? Opinions differ, but at least since the recession, revenue limitations surely played a role.

Marc Lotter, spokesman for Mayor Greg Ballard, said the city's total revenue is down $63 million from 2008 — and that's not adjusted for inflation.

"At the same time you have people saying you need to spend more money on Animal Care and Control, you have people saying you need to spend more money on potholes and you need to hire more police officers," Lotter said. "You have to balance all of those things."

Former shelter director Steve Talley recalled his own push to add five control officers and nine kennel staffers in 2009.

"We really fought for it, we tried to get it, and we had commitments from the director (of Public Safety), from the controller, but again, other things take place and 'you know what, we're gonna try to do it incrementally,' and we just never crossed the finish line," Talley said.

Now a city-county councilman, Talley, a Democrat, said he understands why funding never comes through. And, he insisted, it isn't that the shelter is being ignored.

If he gets $125,000 to add to the public safety budget, he said, "What am I gonna do? Which of those have a greater priority or impact on the quality of life of the citizens of Indianapolis? Naturally, the call is always made to provide for a police officer or a firefighter."

Washington, meanwhile, bristles at the idea that Public Safety hasn't made animal care a priority in her tenure. And she promises to follow through on at least some of the study's recommendations. She and Public Safety Director Troy Riggs have been there about two years, she said, and in that time, "none of our efficiency teams have had recommendations that just sit on the shelf."

The problem, she said, is that money isn't easy to find. The police and fire departments have numerous revenue streams, including a tax earmarked specifically for public safety. Animal Care and Control's money comes exclusively from the county's consolidated general fund, which last year was cut 5 percent across the board.

As such, the marching orders from on high have consistently been "be more efficient." Do more with less money.

The shelter, for all its problems, has done so.

A decade ago, the shelter killed more than half of its animals. Today, as many as 70 percent of the animals that enter the shelter leave alive, thanks to better coordination with private rescue groups. Even medical care is improved.

"When fully staffed, those animals are getting much better attention and veterinary care than they ever have before," said former shelter employee Kirsten VantWoud, the chief operating officer at the Humane Society of Indianapolis.

Cautious optimism

Despite the pervasive optimism, the city's track record leaves room for skepticism.

"There have been all these points where it has kind of come to a crisis," said Republican Councilwoman Christine Scales. "There have been various times where we've gotten a lot of publicity about the problems, and then there's a hurry-scurry by the administration to do something, and then it kind of dies down again."

She suspects animal care is simply easy to ignore.

"They (the animals) are voiceless, they don't have someone politically well-connected to advocate on their behalf," Scales said. "In a sense, it's almost like the administration knows: They've heard it before, (animal welfare groups) get upset, they make their passionate pleas, and then they go away. They go back to working for the animals."

Councilman Zach Adamson, who co-chaired the task force, says it's time for the city to make a choice: fund the shelter properly, or shift its focus to reducing the population.

In Brown County, an aggressive spay-and-neuter program by the local Humane Society reduced animal intake by 60 percent in a five-year period, said Sue Ann Werling, the board's president.

"You get your population down, you don't need the staff," she said.

And, she said, "you're not making decisions on who dies today."

Efforts by FACE, a low-cost spay-and-neuter clinic, have had a similar impact in Indy. The group's director, Ellen Robinson, said intake at Animal Care and Control was down to 17,000 last year from a peak of nearly 33,000 when FACE opened in 1999. But its efforts are limited by funding. "We lose $250,000 a year, just from community cats," she said.

The city provides a $15,000 grant to the organization but little else. Ultimately, that's to the detriment of taxpayers, advocates say.

"If the city were to back spay and neuter more effectively, statistics show that for every $1 you spend in spay and neuter, you save $3 over your animal control budget," VantWoud said. In 2013, animal complaints topped the list of calls to the mayor's action line, accounting for 16,403 calls. This year, they've been eclipsed by potholes, trash and high weeds and grass, Lotter said, but are on a similar pace with more than 15,203 calls through Nov. 9.

Washington said the city could possibly devote more resources to spay and neuter but has no concrete plans to do so.

In the meantime, Hobbs said she's confident that Animal Care and Control will get some money next year for food, supplies and a few new positions. These are small victories, perhaps, in the context of a report that calls for millions in additional funding. But for now, she said, any money at all would be cause for celebration.

"If we could just get it up to miserable," she said, "I'd be happy."

Call Star reporter Brian Eason at (317) 444-6129. Follow him on Twitter: @brianeason.