The Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA wants more funding from Charlottesville and Albemarle and at least the city looks like they’re willing to play ball, Henry Graff reports for NBC-29. The city and the county maintain no animal shelter of their own, and instead outsource that to the SPCA. The contract that the group has with the city and the county brings in about $1.60 for the shelter, care, and feeding of every critter taken in by the group. In an open letter on their website (124k PDF) the SPCA says that the industry standard is between $4 and $7 per animal, and that they’ve unsuccessfully tried to get the municipalities to pay more for several years now. It’s time to renew that contract, and the SPCA says that they’re just not going to sign a deal unless it covers more of the real costs that accompany serving as the pound.
Worst case, the city and county have to start their own pound(s). More realistically, they agree to pay more, since that’s bound to be cheaper in the short or long run than operating a municipal pound.
04/06 Update: Councilor David Brown points out that this funding is per capita, not per animal. So it’s actually wrong to say that the SPCA gets $1.60 for each animal, unless the number of animals they process each year is equivalent the population of Charlottesville and Albemarle, which seems pretty unlikely. What that real per animal funding is, I don’t know, but suffice it to say that it remains significantly lower than the standard cited by the SPCA.
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