The Benton City Council will vote today on a resolution that will restrict the amount of space available in the city’s animal shelter for the Saline County sheriff’s office to house vicious animals.
The resolution comes in the wake of a decision by interim Sheriff Cleve Barfield to no longer supply inmate labor for the shelter.
Benton aldermen in 2010 passed a resolution that allowed the sheriff ’s office to house vicious animals at the Benton Animal Control Shelter at certain rates if the department provided female inmates at least three times a week to help clean the facility. But Barfield told city officials earlier this year that he could no longer provide the inmates because some of them returned from the shelter with drugs.
Benton Mayor David Mattingly said the city can’t continue to carry out the resolution.
“It became obvious the Benton Animal Control Shelter doesn’t have a way to monitor everyone who walks through the door,” he said. “If they’re carrying some kind of contraband, they can place it in a variety of places, and inmates know where that contraband has been placed … The sheriff said he couldn’t let that happen anymore.”
“Once they leave here, they’re no longer under our direct control,” sheriff’s office spokesman Lt. Scottie Courtney said of the inmates.
A shelter employee would sign out the inmates - all nonviolent misdemeanors - from the Saline County jail for the cleaning jobs and be responsible for them until they return, Courtney said. Deputies don’t oversee the inmates, and the sheriff ’s office doesn’t have enough personnel to do that, he said.
There was no way to have a secured environment, Mattingly said.
“We’re not set up to search the public because they want an animal,” Mattingly said. “We’re there for a service.”
Twice last year, authorities found inmates who had drugs, prompting the city to send the animal control staff to get drug tests, Mattingly said. At times, inmates as-signed to the shelter would come back to the jail intoxicated, Courtney said.
“It was enough that [deputies] were extremely careful about the checks” when the inmates returned, he said. “We had a couple of them try to bring stuff inside [body] cavities.”
The city also had problems with the agreement.
The animal shelter would take in more than just the vicious animals and at times, would house “eight, 10, 12” animals from the county, Mattingly said. The city’s shelter, he said, can house 24 animals internally and a total of 48, if the weather allows.
Typically, the shelter runs at 95 percent to 100 percent capacity daily but would sometimes go overcapacity, he said.
After discussions between the sheriff’s office and city officials, the city drafted a new agreement that aldermen will vote on tonight.
The new arrangement calls for the county to pay $15 per day to hold the animals, $35 for any euthanization procedures, $11 for disposal of euthanized animals and $20 for any specimen testing by the state Health Department laboratory.
Under the amended resolution, the sheriff ’s office will no longer be required to provide inmates to clean the shelter, and the county will pay $20 a day to hold the animals, a $5 increase. The other fee rates will remain the same. The city will also limit the department to three spaces in the shelter for vicious animals, if space is available.
“If space is not available, the City is not required to accept any animal,” the proposed agreement states.
Deputies’ response to animal control calls in unincorporated areas of the county is funded by a voluntary animal control tax. The county Quorum Court passed the $5 tax last year, and the level of response depends on how much money is raised.
“I know it’s worked extremely well for us as far as responding to vicious animals to get them off the street,” County Judge Lanny Fite said. “Without that, we could not do that.”
The sheriff’s office doesn’t have similar housing agreements with any other shelters, though Fite said he was confident the sheriff’s office will find other solutions, if the new proposal passes.
It’s a difficult situation and the city has tried to help, Mattingly said.
“That’s all I can do,” he said.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 04/14/2014