You can put a price on man’s best friend

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

This September, Bonner County and the city of Sandpoint will allow their contracts with Better Together Animal Alliance to expire, bringing an end to two 30-year partnerships, during which BTAA has housed and cared for the municipalities’ stray, lost and abused dogs. The decision comes months after BTAA presented its newest contracts, featuring increased budgeting requests to accommodate rising expenses in staffing, insurance, utilities and maintenance, among other factors.

“[The municipalities] are utilizing a service but aren’t contributing to the overall impact of providing that service,” Executive Director Mandy Evans told the Reader in an Aug. 13 interview.

“It ends up that we’re really subsidizing a good portion of the overall work that they’re required by law to be providing, so that’s why we made these shifts. 

“When we say that we can’t afford to do it, that’s honest. We can’t afford to do it,” she added, citing Idaho Codes 25-3501, 25-2804 and 25-3504.

Courtesy photo.

According to Evans, the new billing model is the best practice used by similar organizations around the nation. In it, the county — which accounted for 65% of the 406 dogs that entered BTAA in 2023 — would pay $169,913 annually, while the city of Sandpoint would pay $65,773. The organization brought the same proposal to the city of Ponderay, suggesting it pay $19,184.

“In 2023 we spent over $274,054 to care for stray dogs, so that is what we are looking to build up to,” Evans told the Reader.

Each municipality was given three five-year payment options: pay in full the first year and lock the rate for three years; pay 75% the first year and add a 5% inflation adjustment annually; or pay 50% the first year and add a 24.87% inflation adjustment annually. 

Those prices included the cost of vaccinations, medical checkups, food, housing, 10-day bite quarantines and extraordinary medical events — like gunshot wounds — but not euthanasia of violent dogs, property holds or veterinary evaluations for abuse charges.

“When you look at a nonprofit and what we do, everything that we provide to our community is scaled based on our resources. If somebody were to come to us and say, ‘I need a low-income spay-and-neuter voucher,’ but we don’t have money in that account, then we need to tell them to circle back in two weeks,” Evans told the Reader.

“When we do a contract with the municipalities, we’re telling them that we’ll take an infinite number of stray dogs at any given time. They have their own dedicated area of the facility that they can go to 24/7; and, when we get in, in the morning we have no idea how many dogs are waiting for us. We can’t scale — we always have to be available to them,” she said.

The new contract would have required an approximately 3,000% increase in Sandpoint’s animal control budget, according to Mayor Jeremy Grimm. Sandpoint Police Department Chief Corey Coon and members of the City Council discussed the proposal over several meetings while they prepared their fiscal year 2025 budget, but ultimately decided that the cost isn’t feasible, given the city’s proposed expenses — which include repairing both the roads and outdated wastewater treatment plant.

City officials further argued that costs could be mitigated if BTAA enforced recovery fees for lost dogs.

“One of our challenges is when someone has an at-large dog, if that dog was picked up by the police and turned in to BTAA, we would then go after that dog’s owner and levy a fine to recover our costs,” Grimm told the Reader.

“[BTAA does] not provide us with the names or addresses of the people who come to pick up their dog, so that’s a point of contention that prevents the city from actually getting reimbursed,” he said.

Grimm suggested that, going forward, the Sandpoint Police Department will enforce the fee and either look for donors or send the bill to collections if a person cannot afford the charge. According to Evans, however, on average only 35% of dogs are picked up by their owners nationally.

“People need to know they can come get their dog from us, or they will not pick it up,” wrote Evans in a July 3 email to the Reader. “If they cannot afford the reclaim fee, we will waive it because there is no reason for us to keep someone’s pet in a cage when it has a home, and it costs us more to house that dog than the fee we would collect.”

The Sandpoint City Council passed its FY25 budget on Aug. 21, which included an increased animal control budget of $7,000, and plans to send out a request for proposals to find alternative businesses that could provide the required services within the budget.

“We have internal policy and state policy for different amounts of contracts or services; and, in Sandpoint, anything over $5,000 we need to get written quotes so that we know we’re getting the best value for the public dollars,” Grimm told the Reader. “Once we do that, we would certainly look at that as a per-dog, per-day boarding fee and then try to make the best contract with whatever provider can meet the needs of our solicitation.

“Whether or not BTAA is the only provider that comes forward or whether ‘Farmer Joe’ has kennels and capability, the city will make sure that we act in accordance with the law and that we contract with a provider that can meet those standards,” he added.

Interim solutions include housing dogs in private kennels, veterinary clinics or the city jail. Coon anticipates the RFP will come before the council at its regular Wednesday, Oct. 2 meeting, after officials alter the city’s current ordinance requiring owners to license their dogs and, therefore, compelling the city to enforce a dog-at-large misdemeanor.

“It’s my opinion that these ordinance changes that we are proposing to council will relieve the city of the obligation to impound stray dogs under most circumstances,” said City Attorney Zachary Jones at the Aug. 21 council meeting. “That’s certainly not going to relieve the city — and the police — of the discretion to impound stray dogs.”

Grimm has repeatedly stated that the city still intends to manage its canine residents and that “no one is suggesting that euthanasia is an appropriate solution for this situation.”

“We will be taking care of any strays or dogs that are picked up by the police force no matter what happens in the next month. Rest assured we’re not going to euthanize them or leave them stranded, so to speak,” he added at the Aug. 21 meeting.

Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler informed BTAA on July 17 that his department would not renew its contract — a decision later confirmed in the commissioners’ budgeting workshops — but has yet to publish the county’s chosen alternative plan. The FY25 animal control budget is capped at $15,000, which will not “cut it,” according to Evans.

“The decision to not contract with us is fine. I’m encouraging you to increase that amount from $15,000 to something that you guys can actually do the service on,” she said at the county’s Aug. 26 budget hearing.

Wheeler read a prepared response, arguing that the county has no obligation to deal with stray dogs, and should it need to take possession of an abused dog as outlined in I.C. 25-3504, the county would use the animal control budget to pay for housing and medical care.

“In the proposal that was sent to me several months ago, it was cited that I.C. 25-2804 and I.C. 25-3504 [are] statutes the sheriff’s office is required to follow and uphold. The first one refers to a county ordinance of dog licenses. I.C. 25-2804 is only applicable in counties that have chosen to enact a dog-licensing tax as set forth at I.C. 25-2801,” he said, later adding, “Bonner County does not have a dog license ordinance in place, so we are not statutorily mandated to be responsible to seize and impound any and all stray dogs.”

Once its contracts expire in September, BTAA will no longer accept strays.

Evans repeatedly emphasized that the municipalities do not need to contract with BTAA — and that the organization will even help them to establish a system to care for stray dogs themselves — but they do need to have a clear, publicized plan for the area’s animals.

“The Sheriff’s Department has been dispatching deputies to pick up strays for over a decade,” Evans told the Reader. “The department acknowledged the law and upheld it until they were asked to dedicate more resources (whether they did it on their own or contracted it out) and then they decided it was no longer their responsibility. What will happen to these dogs?”