Orange County animal activist Rose Tingle urged the Board of Supervisors Tuesday to add at least $50,000 to the animal care budget for the coming year to reduce the number of euthanizations at the county facility.
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“This complacency our society has developed over killing … is very dangerous and has to stop,” Tingle told the board, as reported by City News Service.
Supervisors are considering increases in various fees to help close a $626,000 funding gap in the $18 million animal care budget, which is subsidized by 17 member cities. Tingle said Orange County, whose entire budget is more than $5.2 billion, spends less on animal services than any comparable Southern California county.
The county's is farther than most from becoming a “no-kill” shelter, Tingle added. According to OC Animal Care's own data, about 30,000 creatures are taken in per year and about half of the cats and 10 percent of the dogs taken in during 2013 were put to
death.
Proposed cuts the board is considering include closing the animal shelter in Orange on Mondays (saving $167,000ish), and, to free up about $137,000, eliminate a part-time community outreach worker, a public education employee, an overnight supervisor and overtime by 25 percent.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.