The Josephine County Animal Shelter needs your help ! | Season 2 Episode 21

 I went out to the Josephine County Animal Shelter and walked the facility while talking with staff, with Commissioner Gary Richardson there answering questions as we went.

 You’ll see what they deal with day to day and how the place actually runs. They’ve got about 9 staff members and a volunteer base somewhere in the 150–200 range, handling thousands of animals every year. It’s a small crew doing a lot of work, and volunteers are a big part of keeping it going.

 One thing people don’t always think about is animal control officers. They’re the ones responding to calls across the county and dealing with situations most people never see. If that service gets cut back, those calls don’t go away. They fall on local police and the Sheriff’s Office, which ends up costing taxpayers a lot more. A lot of people in this community love animals, myself included, and want to make sure they’re taken care of and safe. 

That’s really what this comes down to. What stood out most is how much things have changed. Years ago, euthanasia rates were around 70% or higher. Today it’s down to roughly 3–5%. Now they’re dealing with more animals coming in and rising costs. 

The focus is keeping things where they are and making sure it doesn’t start sliding backward. That’s why continued support, and even having a real conversation about increasing funding for animal control, matters. If you live in Josephine County, this directly affects your community. 

See the Video here : https://youtu.be/XAY6R7PVOTc

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello folks, my name is Jordan Mortensen. I'm the Joko Republican podcast. Though today is not a political message, it's a common sense one. I'm talking today with Gary Richardson down at Animal Shelter in Merlin, which is by the airport right there. So we're talking about the Josephine County Animal Shelter and how important it is to our community. Let's get into it. So this is Laura. Hi Laura.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

How are we doing?

SPEAKER_02 0:27

Commissioner Gary Richardson. Hi. We're gonna just kind of do a little tour of the animal shelter today, and we're talking a little bit about the upcoming levy change. So we want to go from what is the levy exactly and what is it what does it do?

SPEAKER_03 0:43

We can go for the technical details of exactly what we have and what's about.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Yes, so um the levy on the upcoming May ballot is a 16 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value. Um the average homeowner in Josephine County would pay approximately $3.19 a month. And that um amount would fund the animal shelter and animal control services. It would continue us at the um level we're at, which is maintaining the three animal control officers who respond to nuisance animals, livestock attacks, um, dangerous dogs, animal bites, um, free roaming animals, all of those services through animal control. And then the shelter side of providing care for those impounded animals. So um the 16th cents would continue our level of operations. And we've come a really long way in the last 10 years. Um, we once were uh having euthanasia rates close to 75%, and with funding and more resources, we've been able to cut that down to about three to five percent, most of those being very dangerous animals or very ill animals who weren't treatable to be maintaining a good quality of life. So that status is what gains us the no-kill status in the Shetra world. And um, our goal with the funding would be to maintain that status.

SPEAKER_03 2:16

And so one of the reasons that's really important, the no-kill status tends to attract volunteers. Um, and I forget, how many volunteers do we have out here?

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah, at least 150. I think 200 might be a better guess. Um, there's some who are more active than others, but yeah, it attracts more volunteers, more funding, more adopters, all of that. Um, because people want to support their shelter and support what we're doing here. And um having a high save rate makes people do that.

SPEAKER_03 2:52

And another thing that's important to know is some of the services here are mandated services. So anytime an animal is involved in kind of a crime or something like that, uh, the county is required to keep that animal until the court finishes whatever adjudication it does with that particular case. Sometimes that's a very lengthy period of time. That's a mandated service the county has to provide.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

These are some of our um adopted dogs, a few cats in there through the years. And um, these are just some of the, just some. This is a small amount of the animals that have come through our shelter.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

And I take it you follow the cat boss. This would go to the cat.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Yeah, if you want to head in there, I can show you that.

unknown 3:56

Alright.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

These guys, these are a little like kind of a brother and sister affairs.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Um, two brothers there, yeah. So usually they're very talkative. That's the quietest I've heard them. Don't get them started, they will.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

I like talkers.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Yeah, they're very cute. And any openings you see means somebody got adopted, and typically we're filling them within a few days of um the demand we're seeing of kitties coming in. Right now, we're right on the cusp of kitten season. So um, pretty soon, if you come in here in a month or two, it'll mostly be babies. 1,500 animals in Josephine County last year alone, um, through our shelter programs, are not reproducing in our community. And pet overpopulation is what runs almost every issue we have. We had a 201% increase in dog bites in a one-year period. That's because there's more dogs. There's more, I should say animal bites. There were some cats in there too. Um, but there's more pets, and therefore we're having more issues with nuisance animals. We had as many dog versus livestock cases. Um, last week they said there was as many so far in 2026 as all of 2025.

SPEAKER_03 5:16

Yeah, that's that's a community-wide problem. A lot of times people think, you know, either they don't have pets, don't have anything to do with pets, why should they have to pay for anything? But when you have that many pets in an area, you start to get that many of them, the spillover effect, even to the people who don't have pets, starts to become an issue. That's why we have to have animal control officers. It increases the number of court cases, which causes an expense for the county. So you can kind of think of it as a method of reducing costs in our court system if we can keep the population of nuisance pets to a minimum.

SPEAKER_02 6:03

You have animal control officers, right? And how many do you have currently?

SPEAKER_01 6:08

There's three full-time officers.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

So if you have three officers, and if they weren't here, then the regular police department or the sheriff would have to deal with it, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:17

Yeah, these are still mandated services. And um they would there's some things that need immediate attention and you can't push down the line, an animal attack, something happening that puts a human in safety danger, safety risk, um, that's gonna need to be addressed. And having three officers available to help address those things takes, yeah, alleviates a lot from our other public safety officers. Um, but the reality is that these services will still, whether the levy passes or not, or there's more funding or not, the services still have to be done. It's just what level will they be done at?

SPEAKER_03 7:02

Or was saying to the community, this is something we need to do to continue to do because it's not an increase of 16 cents, it's only an increase of five cents. So it's something the community needs to do to essentially save us costs elsewhere in the Josephine County budget.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Currently, how the shelter is budgeted, if the levy funding that we're receiving expires and is not replaced, then the cat program would probably take another pretty major hit to services. We reduced the amount of cats we can take in quite a bit at the last cut, and we'd probably have to do that again. There have been discussions of not being able to take any cats because our mandated services are really based on those dog intakes. So that is something that could happen. Uh, the staff would be downsized quite a bit, and the staff level is what helps determine our capacity. Capacity is not just number of kennels because you still have to have someone to safely care for them and adequately maintain those animals. So um, yeah, without the current funding we're getting, that that could be on the line.

SPEAKER_03 8:26

And I I'm pretty sure there would be some backfilling from the general fund for that. But yeah, it would be a significant hit to the current services here at the end of the public.