Sahuarita officials said the town is considering breaking ties with the Pima Animal Care Center as early this summer.
The town is considering contracting with other groups — including the Humane Society of Southern Arizona — after county officials earlier this week rejected a customized contract — known as an intergovernmental agreement — from the town. Marana voted recently to drop its contract with PACC in favor of a new agreement for sheltering animals with the Humane Society and hiring its own animal control officers.
Teri Bankhead, an assistant to the Sahuarita town manager, said the town contracts with the county to provide animal control services and wrote the proposal to meet the town’s animal control codes. The contract with PACC expires June 30.
“When we made our recent proposal for the IGA we added a cost in there that we felt represented what our costs were to enforce our animal codes,” Bankhhead said.
The cost of the proposal for the town is capped at $35,000 — about $14,000 less than what Sahuarita paid in the last fiscal year. The county’s IGA puts the cost for PACC services at $88,000.
The town proposal included paying for community education courses, day-to-day enforcement calls, licensing, shelter and veterinary services.
But the town balked at paying for other services, including operations and management, administrative services and specialized services, including a program to spay and neuter feral cats.
For a small town like Sahuarita, Bankhead said, having a service contract that could increase in cost every year made it difficult to anticipate in terms of the annual budget.
“There is no containment — so each year we weren’t sure what we were going to be looking at in terms of expense,” Bankhead said. “It jumped from ‘13 to ‘14 by 140 percent.”
County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry acknowledged that the town’s intent is clear — it will only sign an agreement on the expressed terms and conditions outlined in the town’s proposal. But he is unwilling to offer custom contracts for each city and town in Pima County that uses PACC services.
“This proposed IGA is a significant departure from our present animal care practices,” Huckelberry wrote in a recent memo. “The county views your proposed IGA as a retreat from the present animal care policies of the county that favor adoption over euthanasia.”
Part of the town’s proposed changes is that it calls for the financial responsibilities for the town’s sheltered animals to be transferred to the county after a five-day holding period. The current average length of stay at PACC is about 10 days. “This creates a financial incentive to euthanize Sahuarita animals after the five-day period,” Huckelberry said in the memo. “Such is unacceptable.”
However, Bankhead left the door open to working out an agreement with the county.
“We are doing our best to look at our options,” Bankhead said.
She added the talks with the Humane Society were in the earliest of stages.
