Triplett's Plan: Good News or Bad News?

Was Interim Executive Kurt Triplett’s announcement on Thursday good news or bad news for the animals of King County?

Unfortunately, the answer is, “it depends.”

We would love to take Mr. Triplett at his word, and think that he has now realized that King County Animal Care & Control should not, and cannot provide animal care and control services for the county.

We would love to believe him that his move is directed not only at reducing King County’s looming $56 million budget deficit, but also at providing “better” services for the county’s animals, at less cost to the county’s taxpayers.

And we would love to trust that the negotiations that the county has undertaken with the Seattle Humane Society are in good faith – we were overjoyed at Seattle Humane Society’s announcement that it has offered to take over sheltering services for all stray and owner-surrendered animals in the county. (Read Seattle Humane’s full press release here.)

On the surface, it appears as if King County’s elected officials are embracing the obvious solution to KCACC’s repeated failures: a transfer of sheltering responsibilities to the Seattle Humane Society, which has made its willingness to take on these responsibilities clear; a transfer of animal cruelty and neglect investigations to the King County Sheriff’s Office, where they can be performed by qualified law enforcement officials; and a highly-regulated KCACC that, at most, is only trusted to perform animal control functions, such as picking up dangerous dogs.

But we were given pause when we read between the words of Mr. Triplett’s speech, as he indicated that “animal control” would be performed by a “public-private” organization constituted of current KCACC officers, and that it would include “stray hold” and possible “police powers.”

We were further taken aback as we watched KCACC Officers’ Guild President John Diel gloat for the TV cameras following Mr. Triplett’s announcement.

We were brought to a full stop by word that Mr. Diel is telling Guild members that a reconstituted KCACC would not only keep stray hold, but would also continue to shelter all animals, because he expects negotiations between King County and Seattle Humane to fall apart. According to multiple sources, Mr. Diel is claiming that this new KCACC-like entity will then be the only game in town, and the cities in the county will have no choice but to contract with it for all animal-related services.

Unfortunately, this recent information correlates with reports we have been hearing for months about meetings between Mr. Diel and Mr. Triplett’s top staff, and about plans that Mr. Diel had earlier revealed to create a private agency of his own to take over the duties of KCACC.

This information has caused us to be mistrustful of what, at first glance, would appear to be good news.

On the other hand, we have no reason to mistrust the motives or the intentions of members of the King County Council, including the two council members, Kathy Lambert and Reagan Dunn, who participated in Thursday’s announcement.

Councilmember Lambert has previously expressed her intention of seeing all sheltering services go to a non-profit organization such as Seattle Humane, and to seeing animal cruelty and neglect investigations transferred to the King County Sheriff’s Office.

On Thursday, Councilmember Dunn explicitly compared Mr. Triplett’s proposal to one that he made last year along with Council members Dow Constantine and Julia Patterson, which would have shifted all sheltering responsibilities, including stray hold, to private entities such as Seattle Humane Society. A majority of the council has also long expressed its support for transferring all cruelty and neglect investigations to qualified law enforcement agencies.

Last year’s proposal fell apart after former King County Executive Ron Sims, along with his then Chief of Staff Kurt Triplett, refused to consider the possibility of shutting KCACC down for good. Instead, Mr. Sims advocated a plan under which the Seattle Humane Society would be “allowed” to take all the county’s animals, with no additional funds, after they had undergone the legal three-day stray hold at KCACC.

Seattle Humane CEO Brenda Barnette has indicated that the organization will refuse such a proposal, if that is what is being offered again now. Ms. Barnette told the Seattle PI that she, too, was concerned by the implication in Mr. Triplett’s announcement that KCACC would keep stray hold:

“I do have one huge concern. At the press conference yesterday, Executive Triplett mentioned stray hold as part of the animal control component. We are not amicable to receiving dogs (or other animals) after KCAC has held them for 3 days due to disease control and unnecessary stress on the animals,” Ms. Barnette told the Seattle PI.

KCACC Exposed has long insisted that if sheltering responsibilities are transferred to a non-profit organization such as Seattle Humane, that this agency must receive the animals as soon as they are picked up or surrendered. This is essential because at a high-functioning shelter such as Seattle Humane, efforts to get animals ready for adoption start on the first day, when they are given necessary medical treatment and protected from disease, and their temperament is assessed to determine if they will need behavioral intervention.

By contrast, KCACC regularly withholds any medical treatment from animals on “stray hold,” including even the setting of broken limbs, refuses to isolate new animals from animals with known contagious diseases, often fails to adequately vaccinate new arrivals, and houses animals in stressful situations which create behavioral problems.

No animal should be exposed to such conditions, even for a few days. Once done, such damage is very difficult – and very costly – to undo. If the animals were released to another agency only after KCACC had damaged them, it would increase the receiving agency’s costs, and would decrease the likelihood that the other organization could be successful in efforts to place the animals in new homes. Indeed, it is for this reason that many local organizations currently cannot afford to take animals as transfers from KCACC.

For taxpayers, allowing KCACC (or a KCACC clone agency) to keep stray animals for three days would simply make no sense. Mr. Triplett has announced that KCACC’s Kent shelter will close on Nov. 1. In order to keep stray animals, the county (or the cities) will have to pay for KCACC to build another shelter, and the county (or the cities) would have to keep enough KCACC staff on the payroll to care for the animals for the first three days – only for the receiving agency to have to pay for the facilities and staff to care for them after these three days. No matter who is footing the bill, such duplication of costs and services is an intolerable waste of funds during these tight economic times.

KCACC Exposed has also long insisted that animal cruelty and neglect investigations be turned over to the King County Sheriff’s Office, or to other qualified law enforcement agencies. As King County’s elected officials have long known, KCACC does not have the staff, resources, training, or equipment to properly perform such investigations. Allowing KCACC to continue to investigate such crimes not only results in inadequate investigations and crimes against animals for which no one is ever prosecuted, but also puts unarmed KCACC officers and members of the public at risk – and represents a missed opportunity for law enforcement officers to spot the other crimes, such as drug activity, child abuse, and spousal abuse, that often go hand-in-hand with animal abuse.

In short, no elected official who cares about public safety should allow these crimes to be investigated by anyone who is not a fully trained law enforcement official – sending anyone else out into the field to do this job is, clearly, asking for trouble.

So, what does Mr. Triplett have in mind? Is he going to accept Seattle Humane Society’s offer to take over all animal sheltering for King County? Is he going to ask the King County Sheriff’s Office to take over the investigation of all crimes? Or is he, once again, going to cave to pressure from the KCACC Officers’ Guild, and try to pacify the Guild by giving it responsibilities that it has proven, time and again, it is unable to fulfill?

Only time will tell.

In the meantime, we will hope that Thursday’s announcement is what it appeared to be: the beginning of the end for KCACC, and a new beginning for the animals of King County.

And if it is not, we will continue to work to ensure that the members of the King County Council, and the new King County Executive who will be elected in November, will demand that a fair deal is struck – for both the animals, and the taxpayers, of King County.