Eugene weekly., May 31, 2012, Page 6, Image 6

ANIMAL SERVICES
OVERSIGHT?
As Lane County prepares to turn running its animal
shelter over to a nonprofit agency — Greenhill Humane
Society submitted the only proposal — local animal
advocates remain concerned about keeping the county’s
focus on saving, not euthanizing, adoptable animals.
When it comes to euthanizing dogs and cats, “there
needs to be an oversight committee and people from various
rescues involved with that oversight committee,” Lisa
Warnes of Save the Pets says.
Once heavily criticized for killing too many pets, Lane
County Animal Services (LCAS) has responded to the No
Kill movement by dramatically reducing the numbers of
animals killed and increasing those adopted over the past
five years. LCAS’s advisory committee has a subgroup that
meets specifically to give guidance on euthanasia.
Animal advocates such as the No Kill Community
Coalition would like to see that committee continue, but
Warnes says she hasn’t seen any moves in that direction
under the new proposal. Adding to the concerns is the recent
news that Greenhill euthanized three dogs for behavioral
issues.
Greenhill’s executive director Cary Lieberman says,
“Greenhill will maintain LCAS’s ‘no kill’ policy, although
that’s not what they call it officially.” He says Greenhill’s
practices and policies are consistent with what most people
consider “no kill.”
Lieberman says the dogs that were put down had all
bitten people. A dog named Riley, who came from LCAS,
rarely broke the skin, but “but he would bite hard enough to
bruise.”
He says that Riley’s resource guarding level was five on
a six point Safety Assessment for Evaluating Rehoming
(SAFER) scale. “We do not feel that it is safe to work with
level five or higher aggression in the shelter setting,”
Lieberman says. Despite that, he says Greenhill “spent
months trying to find a suitable home or rescue, and
volunteers and staff worked with him daily.”
“I have a strong concern over it being just the vet and the
trainer deciding who will be euthanized,” Warnes says. She
says and other citizens concerned about Lane County’s pets
will be advocating for an oversight committee at upcoming
City Council meetings.
Lieberman says, “the suggestion has been made to us by
some people in the community that we should have an
external review committee or two on top of what we already
have in place, and we’re exploring it.” He says Greenhill
currently has an Animal Care Committee that meets
monthly made up of volunteers, staff and veterinarians,
which reports to the board of directors, as well as an annual
external audit. He says he is open to suggestions for
anything that improves the level of care and ability to find
animals homes.
Warnes says that it seems splitting LCAS up due to
county budget cuts was a done deal from the beginning so
“all we can do is demand a really solid, fair, unbiased
oversight committee.”
— Camilla Mortensen
DOUBLE DOWN
ON CAPSTONE
APPEALS
The certainty of a 1,200-student housing development at
13th and Olive is growing more questionable. Neighborhood
advocate Paul Conte filed a second appeal of the proposed
development by Capstone, an Alabama-based student
housing developer, May 29.
The latest appeal, to the Land Use Board of Appeals,
contests the Multiple-Unit Property Tax Exemption
(MUPTE), the tax break that City Council awarded the
project, on the basis that state law requires that the project
comply, as submitted or as built, to Eugene’s Metro Plan.
Conte says the requirements of the Metro Plan were not
6 MAY 31, 2012
EUGENE WEEKLY
BIG MONEY
FOR PUBLIC RECORDS?
Commissioner Rob Handy and his attorney Marianne
Dugan have been told it will cost them $3 million to get
the public records they have asked for from Lane County,
Dugan says. She has filed a suit on Handy’s behalf in Lane
County Circuit Court seeking an order compelling the
county both to release the documents and to compensate
for the costs and legal fees.
The public records request arose after Lane County
called a May 3 emergency meeting to decide to release
A mustang captured from Oregon’s Warm
Springs herd is available for online adoption
COURTESY BLM
A MUSTANG ROUNDUP
Oregon’s mustangs and their trainers are in Hines this weekend, as part of an adoption
event that includes more than 500 animals in an exhibition of trained horses that, a mere
three months earlier, were completely raw and utterly wild.
Whether or not you may define yourself as a horse-gal or guy, this weekend’s equine-
centric event will be an exciting spectacle, if you happen to be on Oregon’s eastside. If
you don’t plan to drive over the Cascades but are interested in checking out some of
Oregon’s wild horses up for adoption, there is also currently an online adoption under
way on the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) website through June 6.
The Mustang Heritage Foundation and the BLM host adoption events as a way to
showcase the trainability of Oregon’s mustangs. Tara Martinak of BLM’s Burns District
office says that the idea is “to try to put more horses into private care.”
“We actually get a lot of trainers that do get attached, we’ve had a lot of them get
teary-eyed,” says Martinak of the professional men and women who dedicate three
months’ worth of training to turning a mustang into a domestic-ready horse.
Oregon’s mustangs inhabit 17 public rangelands (termed by the BLM as “herd
management areas”) in southeast Oregon. If you can picture Sisters at the top-left corner
of an imagined box-shaped perimeter that reaches down to the California border, it’s
within that box that these management areas and the Oregon’s mustangs exist.
According to a BLM report from April 2011, there is an estimated population of more
than 2,100 horses on BLM and U.S. Forest Service rangeland in this state. The horses are
periodically rounded up and some of them are removed from the land, which is a source
of some controversy, often because of the method by which they are gathered — they are
often hazed by helicopter.
A little closer to home, another adoption event that is also a competition is the Extreme
Mustang Makeover, which will run from June 29 through July 1 at the Linn County Horse
Center in Albany.
For more information and a complete event schedule, call the BLM Burns District
Office at (541) 573-4400. Additional information about the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro
program and online adoption is available online: http://wkly.ws/qi
— Stacey M. Hollis
sufficiently investigated but were presented to the Eugene
City Council as compliant.
Many aspects of the City Council’s decision to grant the
MUPTE were not land use decisions, Conte says, “but when
they decided that the proposed development is consistent
with the Metro Plan,” that was a land use decision.
“The Metro Plan has very clear and important policies
regarding the protection of the stability and livability of
neighborhoods, and those were not addressed,” Conte says.
He adds that the council could have been in compliance
with state law based on an amendment councilor George
Brown proposed, which would have mandated that the
Capstone project be in compliance with the Metro Plan in
the future rather than stating that it already is. Instead, the
council voted to exclude that portion of Brown’s resolution.
Conte says that City Council’s perception of the MUPTE
approval as an extremely time-sensitive decision might have
changed with sufficient investigation, especially if they’d
discovered a late-in-the-game paperwork alteration that
changed the anticipated completion date of phase one from
fall 2013 to fall 2014.
On May 23, Conte filed an appeal of the council’s
decision to no longer claim ownership of a portion of 12th
Alley. “These two appeals are based on some of the ways
that the staff and City Council didn’t follow the law and did
so in a manner that was clearly to ram this thing through in
minimal time and without a full community discussion as to
our Metro Plan policies and what they require of a project
like this,” Conte says.
— Shannon Finnell
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