FREMONT RESIDENTS WHO work at animal care nonprofits say the Tri-City Animal Shelter has cut back key services since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and that the cuts have made it more difficult to control a burgeoning stray cat population.
They want the shelter, which is run by the Fremont Police Department and also serves Newark and Union City, to reinstate a popular program for controlling cat overpopulation and to be more accessible to the public as it is currently only open for drop-in visits two days a week. The shelter used to be open five days a week, but the hours were cut back in the early days of the COVID pandemic.
Dottie Hutcheon, who worked at Tri-City for about 20 years before resigning in 2020 and currently co-manages a Fremont-based nonprofit spay and neuter clinic For Paws, said in certain parts of town “cats are everywhere.”
“It’s eerie,” said Hutcheon. “Sometimes you’ll see thirty cats all laying out just sunning themselves on the street.”
Cindy Potter, who volunteers as the foster program manager at the animal welfare nonprofit Ohlone Humane Society, said having so many cats without homes is not safe.
“They get sick; they get hit by cars,” Potter said. “They’re domestic animals. They’re not meant to be left outside.”
At least 15 different volunteers and shelter workers have spoken out against these cuts at recent Fremont City Council meetings. In particular, they said the Trap-Neuter-Release program, or TNR, is crucial for controlling the stray cat population. TNR is a service that the shelter, in collaboration with Ohlone, provided starting in January 2019 but it ended with COVID.
It was a unique service for a publicly funded shelter in the area. Shelters in nearby San Jose, Pleasanton and Hayward do not offer TNR. Hilary Danehy, who volunteers for Ohlone as the nonprofit’s spay and neuter director, said the Tri-City program was popular.
“Every single day it was offered, they were full,” Danehy said. “You could see it visibly contributing to the community. It’s a shame that it couldn’t continue.”
Police spokesperson Amy Gee said that TNR was one of several services paused due to COVID-19. While some shelter services have since resumed, Gee said TNR remains closed due to a staffing shortage. The veterinarian that performed the necessary surgeries resigned in Summer 2020.
Lack of veterinarians
In April of this year, Fremont’s city council unanimously passed a referral, which District 3 Councilmember Jenny Kassan first proposed in February, directing the shelter to hire a vet and reopen its TNR program. In May, the shelter put a job posting up attempting to hire a vet and a vet technician. They will need to hire one of each to reopen TNR, but they have so far failed to find anyone. There has been a longstanding shortage of vets and vet techs in the U.S., which experts attribute to job stress and resulting mental health issues, low wages compared to other medical fields, and the high cost of schooling.
In the meantime, Ohlone, whose yearly budget is around $50,000, has been the resource that Fremont, Newark and Union City residents have been using for TNR. Last year, Ohlone processed 678 stray cats with TNR, and this year, it has facilitated at least another 394. Ohlone’s TNR team is entirely volunteer and transports cats to clinics as far away as San Francisco, Richmond, and Redwood City for surgeries. The trips are necessary because local clinics fill up as the demand is so high.
“There’s hundreds of people spending hundreds of hours trying to stop these cats from breeding,” said Potter. “And we haven’t had any help from the shelter since COVID started.”
As Tri-City works to relaunch TNR, it is still facing challenges with being accessible for the public. From the onset of COVID-19 until early May of this year, it had no open visiting hours and residents had to make an appointment for any service, such as dropping off or adopting an animal. Starting in May, at the direction of city council, the shelter reopened for visiting hours on Saturdays; then in June, it also opened on Fridays.
While the hours have expanded, having such limited hours is still atypical for shelters in the area. Publicly funded shelters in nearby San Jose and Pleasanton are fully open seven days a week for visits. Hayward’s shelter is open five days a week.
According to Fremont Police Management Analyst Aly Flores, the shelter is understaffed.
“The ability to open drop-in hours has been constrained due to staffing,” said Flores.
In a presentation in April, Fremont’s police department said it would “expand the shelter’s hours as newly hired staff are on-boarded and trained.” It is difficult to know how long it will take to hire new workers though. Archived job listings show that the shelter has been trying to hire people to work its lowest paid positions — animal care assistant and customer services assistant — since at least fall of 2020.
Hutcheon said throughout her almost 20 years working at the shelter, staffing shortages have been a consistent issue, especially for animal care assistants who perform tasks like handling animals, making sure they’re safe, and maintaining clean environments for them. She doesn’t think such workers are valued.
“The shelter does not value them in terms of benefits and pay rates,” Hutcheon said. “It’s considered a menial job. But they’re a crucial part of what the shelter does.”
Tri-City’s job listing for animal care workers currently offers part-time employment and a pay rate of $21.25 an hour. Customer services assistants, also part-time employees, are now being offered $22.31. The current rates represent a pay raise that started this year. The positions had previously paid $16.80 and $18.67, respectively. Neither job offers benefits.
Flores said the city raised the rates to “enhance and expedite hiring,” but that “despite this increase, the shelter continues to face challenges in filling positions with long-term part-time staff.”
‘They’re just not doing their job’
According to Flores, the shelter currently accepts kittens that are found with no access to resources along with sick or injured animals and maintains “transparency with the community when euthanasia is the likely outcome.”
Yurika Wu, who runs a nonprofit cat rescue service for which she gets no pay called Kitten Rescue 101, said she wants the shelter to do more to facilitate adoptions and that she regularly hears from residents who are told that the shelter won’t accept cats even if they’re sick or injured. Wu, who started Kitten Rescue 101 about three years ago due to “a lack of services from the shelter,” said the shelter often refers both sick and healthy cats to her nonprofit.
“They’re just not doing their job,” Wu said. “The public is not getting help from them and they just keep referring folks to me.”
Wu said her small nonprofit has facilitated more than twice as many cat adoptions than the shelter over the last two years. Data released by the shelter show it facilitated 279 total adoptions in 2022 and 2023. Wu said Kitten Rescue 101 facilitated 582 in this timeframe. According to Ohlone’s data, that nonprofit also facilitated more adoptions than the shelter in 2022 and 2023, as it facilitated 286 cat adoptions.
Cat adoption rates have dwindled every year since 2021 at Tri-City. In 2021 they facilitated 265, then 184 in 2022, and 95 last year. The total number of cats the shelter takes in has also decreased each year. In 2023, it took in 941, a little more than half of the 1,744 cats it took in in 2021. Gee, Fremont Police’s spokesperson, said that the lower amount of intakes is a good thing.
“This is a positive goal for the shelter as we need to keep open space for those animals with the most critical needs which then results in reduced euthanasia of healthy, adoptable animals,” Gee said.
While intakes in the years leading up to the onset of COVID-19 were much higher, so were euthanasia rates. Between 2016 and 2019, the shelter took in 7,839 cats, and euthanized 2,816 of them — about 36%. Between 2020 and 2023 the shelter took in 5,026 cats, and euthanized 497 of them — about 10%.
Hutcheon said that she thinks a number of factors have caused a decrease in cat adoption numbers in recent years for the shelter, including little marketing effort and competition from nonprofits. The biggest reason, though, is “a lack of access to the shelter,” as she regularly hears of people having difficulties getting in contact with Tri-City on the phone.
Still, Hutcheon is cautiously optimistic that the shelter will eventually offer better services.
“They’re under more intense scrutiny, and I think some changes will actually be implemented,” Hutcheon said. “But God knows how long it will take.”
The post Fremont animal shelter struggles to keep up with feral cats amid staffing, budget woes appeared first on Local News Matters.