Animals Gone Wild - Washington's Animal Control Problem | Eastern NC Now

  Most of us are familiar with the cliched phrase “the inmates run the asylum”. In the City of Washington we might want to tweak that to the “animals run the asylum” and the response to the problem is incompetence and makes no sense. We have are sitting on a ticking time-bomb in Washington when it comes to animal control.

   Many residents I'm sure assume that like any normal municipality we have animal control as a routine function of local government. Well dear friends, that assumption is wrong. I have yet to track down why and exactly when but the City of Washington some time ago opted out of the Beaufort County Animal Control jurisdiction. We are the only area in the entire county that does not fall under their jurisdiction. Well surely the city must have provisions for this right? Wrong again. There is no animal control officer in the City of Washington and the Washington Police Department often gets calls about feral cat infestations, animal cruelty cases, rabid and stray dogs but likewise lacks direct jurisdiction in these matters and there is a back and forth between the city bureaucracy and the county bureaucracy on how to handle these matters.

   It is only a matter of time before a stray dog bites and maims a child or worse. And the number of animal cruelty cases in the city is significant. Just how significant we don't really know because we don't have animal control in the city and Beaufort County has no jurisdiction. So you see the dilemma we have. Well, I recently found out that as if it can't get any worse there are a few homes with BAT infestations. Yes bats. One such home is at 325 Harvey Street owned by the infamous Bean Properties LLC, whose registered agent (get this) is our assistant city manager. Can someone say unethical and then can someone further question just why there's no priority given to solving the animal control issue.

   But complaining does little without solutions. I have two possible solutions. The most obvious is that the city hire an Animal Control Officer to deal with these situations. Now I personally would fund this by eliminating the position of Assistant City Manager all together since we have more than enough personnel already to work on the budget and finances, an entire department in fact and an existing City Manager. But Gary, isn't this an essential position? No not at all and most cities don't have an assistant City Manager when they are the size of Washington. Consider that Winterville has slightly more population that Washington and only 85 full-time employees while we have almost 300 full-time employees not counting contract employees. So eliminating this position is a top priority for me to free up money for things such as animal control which is essential.

   There is an option two (though I still want to eliminate the position of Assistant City Manager). I will give the credit here to a local resident who put the idea in my head and I followed up with one of the commissioners. We already pay taxes to the County so why should we not get the same services from the Beaufort County Animal Control as the rest of the county? That just makes common sense. It would save us more money (frugality … a novel concept I hope to bring to the council that the bureaucracy seems to have zero interest in currently). After conferring with a County Commissioner, the services provided to the rest of the county for animal control are indeed minimal. For our city we'd probably want a few additional services (such as bat removal from the slumlord occupying the Assistant Manager's post). We could do this by contracting infra-governmentally with the county and save money in the process. Makes sense and should have been done decades ago but better late then never.

   This is not an issue we should ignore. I would like to hold public hearings to determine from the Washington Police Department how much time, money and effort is spent dealing with animal control issues and trying to coordinate with the Beaufort County Animal Control. I would then like the city to negotiate a favorable contract for service and barring that hire our own Animal Control Officer because someone is seriously going to be hurt and before any more animals suffer under cruel conditions. This is a common sense solution and it's high time something is done.

   It's time that the inmates stop running the asylum and the citizens take their government back from incompetent government. poll#208

If a top, highly paid official in a city owns 38 slum properties with multiple city violations should he be fired immediately or does this have no bearing on his job?

  Fire him immediately ... exit stage right.

  This is his own business and the city shouldn't care.

  I'm high right now and don't care either way.

124 total vote(s)     What's your Opinion?