troublesome. i want to know why there was a different discussion beforehand because i don't think that's appropriate to be talking to supervisors about something that's not the case. >> either option works for me so with that i'm happy to make the motion to continue this item to the -- let's do to the call of the chair. if we can get the information by next week, but i'm not convinced we will. >> i'd like to continue this item to the call of the chair. >> okay, we have a motion to continue this item to the call of the chair. we have a second by supervisor mar. without objection, so moved. item number five. >> item five is to get a better

understanding of -- >> this item was called for by supervisor wiener. >> thank you mr. chairman. just today, you may recall several months ago -- actually i think it was in neighborhood services and safety and we transferred it to budget, we held a hearing to review the overall budget of animal care and control as well as its staffing levels. animal care and control is one of our basic municipal functions. this agency is our safety net for animals in san francisco. the agency runs a shelter that does not pick and choose which animals it act accepts. accepts any animal that is

brought that. this is a very important agency and we've not done a great job making sure it's adequately staffed. we heard in detail a few months ago about the needs of the agency and its budget shord coming. there are not enough, for example, enforcement officers to go out in the field and deal with animal welfare issues. the shelter itself, for a period of time, chosed. i think one or two days a week because it simply didn't have the resources to stay open seven days a week and it's incumbent on us to make sure

the agency is adequately staffed. this is a city where we are passionate about all animals and we want to make sure our budget priorities and the resourcing of animal care and control reflect that passion. i know that the department and the city administrator have put forward a proposal that's detailed in the presentation for a modest staffing increase around shelter services and veterinary services as well as officers out in the field. i think it's a very, very solid proposal and i truly hope the mayor will include the proposal as part of his budget recommendation to the board. with that, mr. chairman, i would ask that rebecca cats, director of animal care and control present to the committee. >> thank you supervisors, thank

you for hearing this matter. i want to start off by renewing my offer to give any of you at any time a tour of our facility, a ride along with one of our officers to better understand what we're doing and how important it is to the residents of san francisco, both two legged, feathered, furry, you name it. and thank you supervisor wiener came down recently and had a tour and picked up almost every animal he saw, had a chance to see the different variety of animals we were working with so we're going to go through a few different things, the agencies mandates, the demands coming our way and then adam will take over and talk about how the budget assessment was done, what -- and what we're looking at -- or what we've asked for and why. >> our mission and mandates, of course we're an animal welfare agency.

we rescue, take in owner surrenders, we adopt out animals, investigate cruelty in other forms of neglect or abuse. we work on coexistence with wildlife, wildlife education, human education and are vieding mutual providing mutual aid. you'll hear from friends of animal care and control and with fredz friends and with the san francisco veterinary medical association to provide low cost vaccinations, microchipping, we provide behavior and training programs, volunteer services, community outreach and we provide shelter for animals when their person can't keep them for some period of time, whether it's the result of a disaster because they've gone into some form of shelter, whether they're in the hospital, whatever it is, we'll take care of their animal for a

short period of time in those kind of emergencies. we have a groomer on scythe and site and as i said human education. aside from the welfare pieces, we are a public protection agency and also a health and human service agency. public safety, our first and foremost prior ity calls would be if there's a dangerous animal. investigating animal abuse it's an indicator of future abuse of people. we work closely with the police department on vicious and dangerous animals. we take bite reports, we do rabies quarantine, we took into diseases, disaster response and as i said, helping people who need us to care for their animals for a period of time so it's the whole range of services for humans related to animals, range of hup humans

related to animals, but also for animals. over the past ten years we've seen an increase in the number of -- not calls. there have been peaks and valleys a little bit, but an increase in the investigations that come our way. investigations can mean anything like abuse, neglect, dangerous animals, things like that. those kind of investigations take a lot longer than standard calls, which can be anything like a stray animal, animal in traffic, dead animal, things like that. but the calls for -- the matters involving investigations take significantly longer. it can be interviewing witnesses, gathering evidence, so on so forth, working with the da's office. so those kind of matters take significantly longer and we're seeing an up tick in those kind of calls.

we have an administrative process where if we seize an animal from someone because we suspect abuse or neglect we have administrative hearings and try and determine whether or not the person should get their animal back and under what circumstances. all of those things take a significant amount of time. our number of intakes have been relatively steady with some interesting trends in that we've seen an increase in the number of dogs coming in where we've seen a relatively significant increase in the number of cats and others being rabbits and bird and so forth have remained more steady -- >> can i ask miss kats d b --

-- i think you know i'm a cat person and i'm wondering why the number of cats is going down and being overtaken by the dogs. >> there has been significant efforts towards spay, neuter of cats. we have partners that do a lot of work in that way, fair farrell cat caregivers. there there has been global warming. it's any number of things. we bereave believe the dog population has increased because of the economy because they're more expensive to care for, veterinary care is more expensive, we see more dogs coming to us with major medical conditions that their owners can't afford to treat them more with behavioral issues. the owners can't get behavior training for them so that's

what we would attribute it to, just the costs and economic impact, people losing their homes, those kind of things. i believe that's why we're seeing the increase in dogs. of course the challenge that comes with in is that dogs require a lot more care on our end. they require behavior and training, perhaps more medical resources, more space, require more -- it's more heavy lifting so even though or number of intakes has remained pretty even, the workload has increased pretty dramatically. especially when it comes to custody animals, we've seen a lot more people in need of us caring for their animals and those custody animals can stay longer because of what's going on so the person can be in jail

longer than with expected. the person may be out of housing for some period of time due to some kind of catastrophe, a fire, whatnot, whatever it is. we're holding their animals for them. any number of reasons and those can be longer in terms of how long they stay with us which gets me to the next slide. our length of stay. we have seen that increase. and for a couple reasons, and in the rescue community as well as in the business community

such as that's really spiked our adoptions, but along with that efforts means longer periods of stay. also, particularly when it comes to dogs, cats and others as well, our rescue partners are struggling with -- they have the same challenges we have which are animals in need of veterinary care, behavior, whatever it is, that there's a cost to it and they're con at stantly trying to fund raise and care for these animals so being our safety net, their anlt to anlt ability to pick up animals from us gets delayed. the expectation from the community is we'll do everything we can to save these animals and we are trying. that kind of goes to the information about where we are in terms of the services we're providing, but i -- if you have

other questions i'm happy to answer them and certainly ly adam can speak to the budget issues. >> good afternoon. adam from the city administrator's office. just going to take a few minutes to walk through the process that we went through to develop the budget proposal and then talk about some of the specifics of the proposal. we reviewed the literature that was available for the standards and guidelines to basically determine what are the recommended levels of staffing for animal care and field services. what were smart, best or emerging practices in the field and from that we looked at a number of the major organizations, such as vets, national animal control a association and we basically found the lit erature for guidelines on animal care are

pretty robust. there are lots of add viesz about vice about how to take care of animals well. there weren't a lot of materials talking about workload and resources attached to it. how do you determine how many officers you need or how many shelter care attendents. and for cleaning within our own agency. we found that we provide about fine minutes or so, not up to the standard. then the other ult what we

found is icc does a great job. they provide more services than most. they have better outcomes than most but that do so with fewer resources which indicates they're quite efficient. that said, based on what we found we think they should have additional resources to better

perform. they are about a 4.8 million annual operating budget. this indicates the budget at fte has been very static at . if you look at the blue line that's their operating budget like supplies, contracted services and that's been pretty flat for most of the period. it was hovering around 500,000 dlar $500,000 despite the fact of increasing costs. what we advocated for in recent years was a $300,000 increase for that and that was about 7 percent or so, but otherwise the program has been pretty

static in level of resources. so what are we asking for? this provides a list -- almost everything is personnel. we found that overall the level of funding available for non personnel items was sufficient, but in terms of staffing we found some did deficiencies. we think that by adding three animal control officers positions, this will help increase officer safety and allow them to partner on various types of calls that are more dangerous, higher risk and it will also allow them to be paired at night. we think this is a highest priority of the items we were asking for. closely following that, in order to have full coverage for the shelter, of course they operate 7 days week and longer than business hours. we have more than 400 animals in the shelter on any given day, as many as 500 and we only have one budgeted veterinarian on staff.

>> can i ask if you could -- you said the three positions for officers are the top priority and does that get us closer to the 1.6 officers that's the staffing level that's recommended? >> it would. if you do the math based on the 1.6 officers per beat, we have four beats, you multiply it out you'd take into con sideration things like employees being on leave, vacation otherwise, add in the additional officers would put us to where we'd like to be. it'd allow us to pair up at certain times so they are safer. >> i think from the previous hearing that's important for the safety of your staff. >> correct. absolutely. and so next step we have the veterinarian. we're asking for just a 0.5, so half fte so that would allow us to employ an as needed veterinarian so that way we'd have full-time coverage. also asking for one

veterinarian technician. there's currently only one fte allocated d towards that so if you had one leave he'd have another available and also helps us do the rounds for selter and processing of animals. next important to us would be the animal care [inaudible]. yep, so it's actually 10 and by adding three it allows us to get closer to that industry standard of 15 minutes per animal per day, which heeds to better socialization, better outcomes for animals, just better care and allow us to have greater flexibility when we have staff on leave to back fill against them. we'd like to have two fte shelter care representatives that will act as the daytime dispatch. we currently have animal control officers act as dispatch and by adding in these

other positions it'll allow us to have the officers in the field as opposed to answering the phones and we think that'll be more efficient. beyond that, we have a request for an animal behaviorist. right now we have a part-time behaviorist that's funded very generously through one of our partnering organizations, friends and animal care and control. by having a full-time behaviorist it'll allow us to spends more time with the animals, to reduce negative behaviors and increase adopt blt. ability. lastly we are asking for one officer for three years that will be in charge of outreach and also help to implement a more robust licensing campaign for dogs and increase viability. this will hopefully bring in more donor dollars to help make the program more self sufficient. it'll increase the number of dog licenses because there are

about 120,000 dogs in the city, only 17 percent of them are registered or licensed despite having a city mandate to to so so by increasing that it'll make the public safer. it'll ensure rabies vaccinations and will help them to be more kwiekly quickly identified if they get lost. by having that it'll increase the revenue for the agency which will make them more self sufficient. the costs for these associated requests is a total of about 900,000 in the fiscal year '15 and then the successive year as we annualize all these positions it increases to about $1.2 million. that concludes our presentation. we thank you for the opportunity to present to you. if you have any questions rebecca and i would be happy to

address them. >> thank you very much. if there are no questions or comments we'll move to public comment. i have two comment cards, sally stevens an nancy stafford. please come on up. if anyone else wants to speak there are public comment cards in the front you can fill out. >> hi, my name is sally stevens and i'm here today wearing two hats, one is the chair of animal commission and one is the chair of sf dog and both hats encourage you to support animal care and control. the animal control welfare commission voted earlier in month to send the letter of support for acc that i just gave to you have also included a letter from commissioner

sherry o'neil who could not be here today emphasizing the important role that acc plays in preparing for and responding to di sasers. sasers. in addition i have numerous letters, together we represent thousands and thousands of dog owners and guardians and we all urge you to support this budget proposal and support animal care and control. it's underfunded and understood staffed and has been for years. the most perezing pressing things get done. there's so much more they could be doing if properly staffed and funded. i'd like to add in addition to what was mentioned is that the acc's budget include monoe money for a part-time hearing officer for dog court that

deals with cases involving dog bites and aggressive dogs. over the years the unit in the hearing officer have developed broad community support because of the fair and compassionate way they deal with dog owners and victims all the time. all the while they keep public safety foremost in minds. [inaudible] just like to remind you this really isn't just about animals. as is mentioned people who abuse animals often neglect and abuse spouses and children. not just the most heinous will save human lives too. please support this additional budget proposal for acc. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> good afternoon, supervisors, my name is nancy stafford, i'm .

we support the increases for the acc budget, especially the vicious and dangerous dog court, a trend setting program that has proven to be an important asset to the community. i have personal experience with the court. i testified on behalf of a client. my client called me extremely worried because she had been summoned to court. i assured her that the hearing officer was fair and knowledgeable and her dog would not be taken away or arbitrarily youth ewe youth niezed. the incident appeared to be a misunderstanding and the two owners worked it out with the help of the court. in the jurisdictions people are hesitant to report a dog problem for fear of causing another person's pet to suffer serious consequences.

therefore the problem often goes unreported when the solution could be mandated training or requiring the dogs to always be on a leash or muzzle. the result, a potential danger to the public could have been easily solved if the trustworthy system were available to them. please allow acc to hire a knowledgeable hearing officer to continue this important pranl, a program. a hearing officer requires a special set of skills and experience. thank you. >> thank you. is there any additional public comment? please come on up. ? >> hi my name is kelly.

>> and should be commended. we at pet food express often hold up acc for its inveigh ti approach for saving lives. it was the first shelter in the state to set up a permanent off site adoption center. acc knew that getting the animals in front of potential adopters outside the center would result in more adoptions, and it has.

the number of animals in need and in distress is not going to go down. it seems everyday we hear another story of animal abuse, neglect or homelessness. to adoptable animal should be put down. we need to continue to raise our standards for animal treatment and adoption and we can't do it effecttively without the arc. without the budget to do it -- thank you for helping. cc. without the budget to do it -- thank you for helping. i'm officer john danny, san francisco police. previous speakers said some very kind things about the vicious and dangerous dog court and i'm the hearing officer and i appreciate all the kind words, but i wouldn't have been able to do all this without the help of animal care and control and it's -- to say they're