After a decision made earlier this week, a Clinton, Iowa animal shelter is no longer accepting stray animals from their own city. Not only are they not taking animals in, but they’ve been cut off from the funding they receive from the city.
Clinton Humane Society in Iowa has been around since 1941.
"This is a huge priority there's a lot of animal lovers in Clinton, Iowa,” says the Clinton Humane Society operational manager Sandy Bartles.
The shelter now faces a new problem. Clinton’s Mayor Mark Vulich vetoed city council’s decision to approve the city’s contract with them, "There’s a time where the tax payers have reached that point that they don't want any more taxation so we got to draw a line some place."
The non-for-profit shelter receives about 30% from donations and fundraisers. They rely on the city for the rest, “It’s extremely important, that’s a huge source of funding for us,” says Sandy.
Mayor Vulich says there’s not enough money to fund them, “our budget is very tight, we don't have the money even for that so we're either going to have to dip in to reserves to pay it or we would have to potentially have to do some cut backs somewhere else in some department."
He says their cost has increased too much over the last year from $65,000 to $120,000, but Sandy says that comes with the change of time, “Everything is going up and certainly our cost for taking care of the animals are going up just like everything else."
Now that the society doesn’t have the contract with the city, they can no longer take in any stray animals in Clinton, forcing them to check ID’s to anyone dropping off animals."We're asking for driver's licenses when anybody brings an animal in, because we're still taking animals from all of the cities that we have contracts with."
City council will have to have a three-fifths majority to override the mayor’s veto. The shelter is accepting donations at Clinton’s Humane Society location or donate on their website.