New York Magazine, page 14, June 17, 1996

City

"IN THE DOG HOUSE"

Around lunchtime last Wednesday, Morris the Cat, who was sitting languidly in a director's chair, hosted a small publicity event at New York City's Center for Animal Care and Control Shelter on 110th Street. Maybe ten reporters were there, and they ate cookies and drank coffee in the center's tidy backyard while a couple of young dogs barked at Morris from a chain-link dog run.

Four television crews zoomed in on Martin Kurtz, the smiling 52-year-old executive director of CACC, as he stepped to a podium to accept a two-by five-foot check for $5,700 from the Heinz Pet Products corporation. "I'd like to thank Morris and Heinz for this generous donation," he began.

It was an unusually sweet moment for the city's animal shelter. There were no sick cats or bewildered pit bulls being hauled through the front door by police officers, the morning killings had been completed, and most noticeably, there were no angry employees confronting Kurtz. Perhaps that's because many of them have already quit.

Scotlund Haisley, the former head of the Manhattan shelter, took a job in San Francisco two weeks ago. "I couldn't get even the most basic problems fixed," he says. "The building is falling apart. The cages are falling apart. Nobody in there is doing anything about it." The CACC's former coordinator of volunteers and fund-raising, who asked that her name not be used, took a new job in March. "We were taking in money in donations and not spending it," she said. "Not even on immediate problems." CACC's former public-relations director, Pamelyn Ferdin, quit a month ago. "Imagine," she said, "an office that basically does not function."

When the ASPCA announced three years ago that it would no longer be the city's animal catcher, many saw an opportunity to improve a notoriously bungled system and to find an agency that would better handle the staggering job of taking in the nearly 60,000 pets that turn up in the city's shelters each year. But their excitement did not last. In late 1994, when no outside agency was willing to do the job for what the city was willing to pay (around $5 million a year, roughly the same amount paid to the ASPCA, which relied on donations to make up the remainder of it's roughly $6.5 million annual animal-control budget), the city created a semi-independent, non-profit company and placed it under the supervision of the Department of Health. And since January 1, 1995-- amid protests by animal-rights activists at City Hall, complaints about cronyism, and even allegations of negligence-- the center has moved into the old ASPCA facilities, hired a staff, and taken over the basic service of capturing, accepting, placing, and destroying unwanted pets.

"What really ticks me off," says Martin Kurtz, CACC's executive director, whose previous job was with the city Department of Health, "is that we've only gotten bad press since the beginning, and that ultimately just hurts the animals. CACC had less money than the ASPCA, but our adoption and capture rates are higher." (New York has a slightly better than average euthanasia rate: Last year, 24,263 dogs, 26,120 cats, and 574 other animals were taken in; 14,560 were successfully placed in homes; 40,421 were killed.)

The CACC rates are only marginally improved, though--less than 1 percent more adoptions-- and as former shelter director Haisley points out, "The ASPCA was doing a lousy job." Haisley and the others said they were far more concerned with how the agency's resources are being allocated. "What is the organization doing with the (donation) money?" Haisley asked. "It's certainly not going to the animals."

A half-hour after the Morris event, down at the center's cramped and stuffy headquarters near City Hall, Kurtz and the center's general counsel, Douglas Mansfield, steadfastly maintained the agency was doing the best it could with what it had. "We're a new business," said Kurtz. "We're trying to save up for big projects, like in-house spay-neuter facilities for the Brooklyn and Manhattan shelters."

Last year, CACC spent only around $21,000 of the $76,000 of public donations it collected. Meanwhile, Haisley and the others charged that the shelters lacked basic equipment to care for the animals. "I requested rubber mats so the animals wouldn't have to lie in their own urine, new cages, sanitary towel dispensers," said Haisley. "But I couldn't even get basic sanitary equipment to stop the spread of disease."

Kurtz replied, "I've never denied anybody equipment that would help the animals. That's ridiculous. Why would I?"

Asked why, then, he thought his former employees were so upset, Kurtz suggested, "People get impatient, especially people who work in the animal-care industry."

That Kurtz separates himself from the animal-care industry is perhaps telling. "What people should really be looking at is the way CACC, a supposedly independent company, is set up," says another CACC source. "Next year, the city wants to cut its budget by $200,000. The board of directors should be organizing protests, but three out of five of them are senior city officials who were placed by the mayor."

--Norman Vanamee