Animals’ Lives In the Balance
Friends,
I hope you’ve enjoyed your weekends. The highlight of mine was the annual Feast of Lanterns in Spades Park - where this year, I was honored to serve as the emcee for the event. I had a wonderful time - though on Sunday I was feeling the aftereffects of being high-energy and public-facing in extreme heat for such a long day!
Today I wanted to dive into an issue that has attracted emails and media attention alike: the recent firing of workers at Indianapolis Animal Care Services. I’ll share details about what happened in recent years, what the workers are asking for, what management is asking for, and why I think the real issue has to do with funding and resources. This will be the first of a series of emails digging deep into the city’s budget.
Animal Care in Indianapolis: a short background.
Animal care and control has been at a crisis level in Indianapolis for many years. Five years ago, the news was running stories about the single city-run animal shelter being at capacity with no room for new dogs. This story was repeated many times over the next several years. Though some months and some years fared better than others, conditions were bad and getting worse for both the animals and the employees at IACS. By 2021, the HVAC, plumbing, and other mechanical systems at the Harding Street shelter were obviously failing,
Last year, a group of over 100 animal advocates wrote an open letter to Joe Hogsett asking for urgent action to help provide funding, staffing, and a bold vision for IACS. They pointed out some horrifying facts: nearly 800 dogs had been euthanized at the shelter in the first 8 months of 2023. IACS staff were recorded telling people surrendering animals to lie about where the animals were picked up in order to get them into shelters in other counties. Union staff were walking off the job to protest conditions for humans and animals alike.
I visited the shelter during this time period, and can personally attest to the horrific and inhumane conditions. Air conditioning units were not functioning properly. Dogs in crates were filling every hallway. Outdoor areas were not cleaned appropriately and were in rundown shape. Dogs had open wounds that weren’t able to be treated properly. Dogs were in obvious trauma and fear from the overcrowding and the heat. Disease ran rampant. The smell was horrific.
The new facility for Indianapolis Animal Care Services that was originally expected to go online in 2023 has still not substantially begun construction as we are approaching the end of 2024.
A second visit I took, earlier in 2024, did show some things turning around. Conditions were still intolerably bad, but were a marked improvement from the previous fall.
That background and context is absolutely vital to understand the recent scandal at IACS. City department leaders and managers have put substantial energy and time into trying to turn the situation at IACS around. New management and new board members have been brought in to help identify where the systems, staff, and processes are failing. The new management also brought in consultants from Best Friends Animal Society to evaluate the organization’s practices and policies and provide recommendations.
Best Friends consultants made a series of recommendations to IACS leadership. The most important three recommendations were:
1. Stop having adopters fill-out applications as soon as they walk through the door. IACS should be capitalizing on the excitement of someone coming to the shelter and getting them right into a kennel, not sitting them down with paperwork to start their visit.
2. Highlight and rotate more dogs through the front kennels – IACS saw a measured increase in adoptions for those dogs as compared to the ones that visitors could not see until proceeding deeper into the facility.
3. Only research adoptees through the internal IACS tracking system, Chameleon. The broader MyCase system was to be used intermittently when necessary.
Management asked to better understand the third recommendation. They found it is not currently considered best practice to put up additional barriers between those wanting to adopt animals and going home with those animals. One similar comparison: in past years, most animal shelters screened out renters and forced renters to bring copies of their lease to prove they were allowed to take animals home before shelters would allow pets to leave. But most renters are responsible and have a plan for dealing with their landlords, and especially given that IACS has to euthanize animals for capacity reasons, it’s better for animals and people alike to help people adopt rather than find reasons they should not adopt. I have met personally with leaders and believe that this policy decision was made out of a desire to help more animals and help make the organization run more smoothly and efficiently.
But volunteers and staff members at the shelter did not all agree with this new policy. Especially in the context of animals being adopted and then tortured and killed in recent years, some staff found it totally unacceptable not to research potential adopters on MyCase to look for criminal histories they found red flags for future animal abuse. The staff, too, are all hardworking and dedicated animal lovers who put up with horrific work environments and frankly insufficient pay and benefits out of their love for animals. They, too, were operating in good faith and trying to do what was best for the animals and the city.
The explosive combination of staff and management having different ideas about best practices came to a head earlier this month when two staff members were fired, allegedly for checking MyCase after being told the shelter was no longer engaging in that activity. This has caused a turmoil on social media and several articles and stories in the local news.
I have spoken to constituents and supporters on both sides of this issue. The majority of folks who have reached out to me feel that the staff should not have been fired and the policy is wrongheaded. But many of the most engaged people who routinely volunteer, serve on the board, and have deeper connections in the broader animal welfare community have jumped to management’s defense.
My perspective is that it is impossible to run a functional animal welfare system in a dysfunctional city. I’ve been impressed by management at IACS, but management does not determine the facility’s budget. Mayor Joe Hogsett proposes the budget, and the Indianapolis Marion County City County Council passes the budget.
The 2025 budget for IACS does take several important steps forward. IACS is brought out from underneath Business and Neighborhood Services in the hopes that as an independent department, it has better access to decision makers and more focused leadership. I think that’s the right call. The proposed agency budget was also increased from roughly $7 million per year to $8 million per year - certainly a step in the right direction.
However, as a point of comparison, Cleveland’s (privatized) animal shelter has a budget of over $10 million, and they intake only around half the number of animals that IACS does. Atlanta is a much bigger city, but their animal welfare system receives over double the funding that Indianapolis provides. Unionized staff members starting out at IACS in 2024 make less than what was considered a ‘good wage’ back in 2018.
Don’t get me wrong - city leaders are not the only ones to blame for this intolerable status quo. Far too many animals are flooding onto the streets of Marion County, and when the Indianapolis City Council worked to ban commercial breeding in light of having no capacity to help deal with these animals, lobbyists for the puppy mill industry overturned the local legislation with a new state law. As usual, our State government seems to find it amusing to force misery on our city and deprive our leadership of the tools needed to fight back.
But Indianapolis leaders can and must do more to stand with our animals. I’m not interested in assigning blame to middle-managers who are being asked to make do with insufficient funding, staff, and support from the highest levels. Instead, I want to focus on how to actually solve the problems of animal welfare in Indianapolis - and that requires making tough political decisions around either raising revenue or cutting services.
The live release rate at IACS suggests that currently, the Mayor and other leaders are satisfied with killing a certain number of animals in the name of a balanced budget.
Are you satisfied with this decision? How much more would you pay in taxes for a functional animal care system that did not crowd dogs into hot hallways and euthanize hundreds every year?
As I mentioned, I’m going to be writing more emails taking deeper dives into areas where the proposed budget fails to meet the needs of our city and district. Expect to see even more frequent emails from me during budget season!
In love and solidarity,
Jesse