SAN ANTONIO – A recent City of San Antonio audit found Animal Care Services has not been monitoring some of its biggest rescue group partners well enough.
The Office of the City Auditor examined how well ACS and eight rescue groups were following their contracts, which pay the groups to pull animals out of the ACS shelter and find them a permanent home.
Though ACS works with hundreds of rescue groups, only those eight had paying contracts in fiscal year 2023, which ended in September. Most rescue groups are simply able to pull animals free of cost.
Of the 9,437 animal rescue groups pulled from ACS in FY 2023, nearly half were by one of those eight groups. San Antonio Pets Alive (SAPA), which is the primary rescue partner, pulled 3,644 of them.
Among other issues, auditors found ACS was not regularly inspecting most of the groups’ facilities, nor was it requesting monthly status reports on what had happened with the animals the groups had pulled. The exception was SAPA, which operates out of a building on the ACS campus.
Auditors also reviewed a sample of 17 animals that left ACS custody and weren’t able to find proof of sterilization for three of them.
“Without appropriate monitoring,” the audit report states, “the health and safety of these animals may be at risk once they leave ACS’ custody.”
Other issues included ACS not ensuring the groups had all their documentation in order and all eight of the groups having various problems with insurance coverage.
ACS Director Shannon Sims signed off on an action plan in response to the issues in December, and a city council committee accepted the audit without any discussion earlier this month.
Assistant to the Director Shannon Oster-Gabrielson told KSAT that has already made changes and has a new contract coordinator position that will “handle a lot of things that were noted in the audit.”
Most of the problems, she said, were because of paperwork.
“So some of the things they said in there that sounded alarming at first, it’s really not. We’re doing the work; we’re just not documenting the work,” Oster Gabrielson said.
For example, Gabrielson said ACS spays or neuters most pets before they leave the campus, but some may be too young or in too bad of shape.
“But these are our partners. We have contracts with them. We trust them. We have longstanding relationships with many of them,” she said. “They’re spaying and neutering their pets. If they get a puppy that’s too young, it’s just that we need to go back and check with them afterward.”
However, Gabrielson acknowledged ACS had realized around the time of the audit that it needed to do site visits.
“It’s new to the contracts, I will say,” Oster-Gabrielson said. “It wasn’t something that we would have done before and we didn’t have a there wasn’t a strong need for it. But I will say in the last couple of years, we’ve had to start having really difficult conversations with some of our rescue partners about making sure pets when they leave our care, that they continue to be in humane care.”
A spokeswoman later confirmed ACS had cut ties with five non-paid rescue groups in the past year.
Oster-Gabrielson said ACS has been doing “different inspections and different levels of inspections” in the past year. Some groups aren’t even based in San Antonio. So some inspections are done virtually or by inspecting the cars that come to pick the animals up.
Others may not have a large shelter, but instead be foster-based.
“So how would you go and investigate or inspect 100 rescue foster homes?” she asked.
Oster-Gabrielson said ACS would do “various, random inspections,” primarily focused on the eight groups with whom it has paid contracts.
Though it wasn’t a focus of the audit, the report also noted that out of the $427,000 in contracts, nearly $67,000 had been left on the table.
The groups were paid for each animal they pulled from the shelter, but none of the groups maxed out the number of pets they could have pulled.
Oster-Gabrielson said one of the main reasons was that the compensation wasn’t enough: between $75 and $125 for each pet. ACS has since raised that amount to a flat $200 per pet.
There is also a declining number of adoptions, not just locally but around the country, she said.
Read the audit below: