During this same period, July 2007, Forest Turner was appointed to an interim director position at Code Compliance, and that's when England says things began going sour, and hit a peak in late 2008 after Turner became the full-time director of Code Compliance. Communication between city staff and the Animal Shelter Commission became strained, and a previously smooth working relationship turned hostile.
Of the increasing acrimony, says England, "I attribute it to a change in leadership at Code."
Mark Graham
Lieutenant Scott Walton, interim division manager at Dallas Animal Services, has
demonstrated his “compassion” charge to shelter workers by fostering shelter
kittens at home. He believes “responsible pet ownership,” including strict adherence to spay and neuter laws, will be the best
long-term solution for the shelter.
Mark Graham
The 2010 Humane Society audit of DAS found that cat keepers were "overwhelmed" by minimum daily responsibilities. Here, veterinary assistant Ameha Gebremichael checks on a kitten after an exam.
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While the physical plant of Dallas Animal Services had been transformed dramatically for the better, what went on inside the facility and at City Hall remained unchanged.
In early 2008, complaints surfaced in the press about urine pooling in inoperative drains in the facility and the mistreatment of dogs, including workers dragging them from cages to the euthanization lab. During McDaniel's term as division manager, two temporary workers were fired for mishandling shelter dogs. By the late spring of 2008, after a little more than a year on the job, McDaniels was reassigned to another city department. He could not be reached for comment.
For a second time, and after a third national search since the 2001 HSUS report, former shelter director Kent Robertson was brought back to oversee DAS.
"We were thrilled," says England of the ASC. "He did great before, and we [could] work with him." But with all the shake-ups, relationships had deteriorated among shelter managers, the city and the ASC. In 2008, the commission worked with the city council and enacted stricter, more progressive ordinances regarding the spaying and neutering of pets and the tethering of dogs, and conflicts arose over how to best disseminate this information to the public—shelter workers themselves were poorly educated about these changes.
Things the ASC—and the HSUS, in some cases—had wanted were not implemented, such as improved communications with the public and social networking through Facebook and the shelter website.
Maintenance issues were repeatedly noted by the ASC, especially dealing with the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system. Current ASC chairman Skip Trimble recalls Robertson assuring the commission that the problems were being dealt with. But when the HSUS report came out, those auditors also saw HVAC problems.
"Our advice was good advice and has been proven to be good," Trimble says, "because it's pretty much the same thing as the HSUS recommended in their [2010] report."
The commission, which meets regularly with DAS representatives, felt it was being ignored, even with Robertson, someone they respected, leading the division. Recommendations and changes were "talked about and thought about and ignored," England says. Nothing seemed to stick over the two years Robertson held the division manager position for a second time.
More than anything, commissioners felt that Suhm and Turner, who would become Assistant City Manager, were trying to impose their will on the ASC as well as the shelter. In October 2008, the commission was told in a mass e-mail from Assistant Director of Code Compliance Lynetta Moore that it was scheduled to participate in an Animal Services Halloween retreat, though no one bothered to ask anyone on the commission for input. "It was like, please report for duty," England recalls. "Many of us found that very offensive."
Commission members contend that Robertson was physically present at the shelter but seemed less hands-on than before. His job as shelter division manager included supervising Tyrone McGill, who much to the dismay of commission members admitted he had never even owned a pet. He was close friends, however, with Robertson's boss, Forest Turner, so managing him was somewhat tricky, says animal rights attorney Feare. "Cronyism doesn't make for good management."
The cat death and resulting criminal prosecution of McGill was not the only instance of animal shelter abuse to get negative play in the press in the last 18 months.
In July 2009, 27 dogs were returned to an owner who had demonstrably neglected them. And that was after the new 2008 ordinances had put a cap on pet ownership at six animals. The city looked as though it was violating its own legislation.
In August 2010, field worker Donnie Jones, who had been disciplined in 2009 after leaving two severely burned dogs to suffer alone in kennels inside DAS without notifying anyone, was accused of handling a cat roughly with a catch pole. Then in September, when a Dallas police officer was called to the scene of an injured dog in East Dallas, according to police reports, he witnessed animal control officer Charles Jackson "dragging the injured dog to the animal control vehicle and picking it up by grabbing the dog's rear fur" as it cried and whimpered. The dog, which was microchipped and identified later as someone's pet, was eventually euthanized.
Attorney Feare says that the work environment at DAS had grown so hostile that some staffers engaged in a campaign to discredit his client Domanick Munoz after he testified against McGill before the grand jury.
In a letter to City Attorney Tom Perkins written before the grand jury considered the case, Feare wrote that there was a "concerted effort on the part of several supervisors and employees" to elicit written statements against Munoz. People also began spreading rumors about Munoz's family, Feare says: "They said his wife was a lesbian." The city said it hired an independent investigator to examine Munoz's complaints and the entire McGill incident, but so far, his client, who still works for DAS, has not been contacted for a statement, Feare says.
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