Kansas City will know in 30 days how the city plans to change animal control.
The full city council Thursday voted unanimously to direct City Manager Brian Platt to “develop an implementation plan to insource animal control operations.”
If such a plan is approved by city council, it would strip animal control away from KC Pet Project, who won the contract almost five years ago. Under a one-year extension, KC Pet Project will run animal control until April 2025.
While this is not the final word, there was a strong indication that the city will resume animal control.
Mayor Quinton Lucas apologized to Councilperson Melissa Robinson for his support of KC Pet Project taking over animal control in 2020. He said Robinson warned the council at the time that KC Pet Project wasn't up to the task.
"I think everything you said and predicted, unfortunately, has been proven to be accurate," he said.
KC Pet Project submitted a plan for contract renewal, but a committee rejected it on Dec. 2, according to the Neighborhood Services Department.
Platt has already suggested some changes.
“It's a good opportunity for us to rethink the entire service from scratch,” he told KCUR. “There's a lot of ways that we're going to hopefully do that as we start afresh, leveraging technology in different ways.”
For years, animal rescue groups and neighborhood organizations have complained about KC Pet Project’s slow response times and lack of enforcement for irresponsible pet owners.
Several people spoke at a Tuesday committee meeting to urge the city to bring animal control back in-house.
“We were attacked by 2 dogs just a couple blocks from our house,” Ruth Stephens said in written testimony. “Even though our dog almost died, my husband's hands and arm were bit and I was knocked down and bit in the face, (KC Pet Project) didn't send a control officer out to follow up with us until 6 days later,” she wrote.
KC Pet Project CEO Teresa Johnson pushed back. “We have increased enforcement and increased the number of citations we issue significantly,” she said.
Johnson said her animal control officers have written almost 900 citations this year. A 2023 KCUR investigation discovered that in the two years before KC Pet Project took over, Kansas City animal control officers wrote 3,683 citations, according to municipal court data.
But the two years following saw only 1,973 citations written by KC Pet Project officers, a drop of 46%.
Councilmember Melissa Patterson-Hazley said the city manager’s plan needs to include how many people animal control needs to hire, how many vehicles it will need and how to improve dispatch times.
In a statement to KCUR, KC Pet Project predicted the transition would be challenging.
"Transitioning such a critical operation will create massive disruptions to the quality of care and responsiveness that Kansas City residents have come to rely on," Tori Fugate, chief communications officer for KC Pet Project.
"Moreover, this shift will result in a considerable financial burden on taxpayers, introducing unnecessary costs for the city to rebuild infrastructure, hire and retrain staff, and establish systems that are already effectively in place through KC Pet Project."
