Holiday Island council discusses ideas for possible animal control law

The Holiday Island City Council brainstormed for nearly three hours during a workshop held Wednesday, Feb. 7, outlining ideas to put in place an animal control ordinance.

Council members used an ordinance from Berryville as a guide, going line-through-line in discussions with Cole Wakefield, executive director of Good Shepherd Humane Society in Eureka Springs, on what is appropriate in Holiday Island.

Council members discussed many types of animals but the main discussion was regarding dogs and whether permits would be part of the ordinance, possible fees for the permits, fines if rules were violated, and definitions of such terms as an abandoned dog, what is considered humane and considering how a nuisance animal would be determined.

The role of a future animal control officer was also debated. “I took most of the content from Berryville’s ordinance, added some things and deleted some things that I didn’t think we needed to get into, such as circus animals and stuff like that,” Holiday Island Mayor Dan Kees told the council. “Some city ordinances are pages and pages long because they get into every conceivable kind of situation.

“I don’t think we want an ordinance that onerous, that causes people to have to do things that really don’t benefit the community.”

Some things in the Berryville ordinance wouldn’t necessarily be enforceable in Holiday Island, the mayor said.

“I don’t want something in this ordinance that we can’t enforce,” Kees said.

Dog complaints are common and discussions included dogs running loose around the city, dogs that are not taken care of properly and making sure threatening dogs are properly controlled.

“In my three-plus years of answering the phone for the city, we get more calls about dogs than probably any other kind of complaint,” Kees said. “… It’s probably the number one thing that people call code enforcement about. I think in three years we have had zero calls about cats. … Obviously, we’ve had inquiries about chickens and other kinds of wild livestock like goats and horses, but we’ve not had any complaints about any of that stuff, just inquiries.”

Wakefield shared his opinion to the council on topics such a requiring a dog to be licensed and whether to charge a fee.

“In a town around this size your compliance with licensing is going to be like 5 percent,” Wakefield said. “People aren’t going to get their license until they get a visit from the animal control officer because their dogs a\e running at large.”

The key, Wakefield told council members, is a way to keep a log of “who owns what dog or cat.”

“Instead of a fee, you have a free license that just basically encourages people to identify … So, it makes it easier to return the animal home if they do go at large,” Wakefield said. “There are hundreds of dogs that live in Eureka Springs and maybe a handful of licenses get issued every year.”

Wakefield said Good Shepherd would work with Holiday Island and provide things such as microchip events and tag engraving with the contact information for the owners of the pets.

The council agreed to review a new draft of the ordinance and discuss it in a future workshop.