In Santa Cruz, the county animal shelter is run by a shelter manager along with a group of high-ranking officials in the county. It's not the most efficient way of doing this, especially because these politicians and police chiefs don't know very much about animals or running a shelter. It's not their fault- they've dedicated their lives to helping people, not animals. How are they supposed to run something they know nothing about?
In any case, Lynne, Margaret, and I went to the meeting to protest the fee on cat traps. Lynne went up and spoke about why we shouldn't have a fee, and another woman also protested it. Then, while it was being discussed, several issues came up, so Lynne told me to go up and speak. I talked about my own trapping experiences and how my family could not have afforded $10 every 10 days over several months while I was trapping a colony.
While the discussion was going on, we learned that the new manager of the Animal Shelter wasn't actually clear on what Project Purr actually does. She knew that Project Purr tries to take as many feral cats from the shelter as they can (in order to prevent the cats from being put down), but she thought that the cats were released into colonies that Project Purr maintained throughout Santa Cruz. This is obviously quite false. I think what really needs to happen is for Project Purr and the Animal Shelter to sit down at a meeting and have Project Purr explain what exactly they do, so that everyone will be on the same page.
Unfortunately we lost. Apparently this happens a lot. One of the board members suggested that the shelter have a suggested donation, but even that didn't pass. The only slight victory we had was that it would only be put in place for four months.
It was interesting to see the process and learn more about government with animals. Lynne made two very good points though- 1. animals and government should never mix, and 2. animals and money should never mix. Unfortunately, sometimes they have to.
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