- Melanie Cohen
Stockton, Calif., residents who are trying to prevent their animal shelter from prematurely euthanizing abandoned cats and dogs have made it past a key legal hurdle: the city’s bankruptcy case.
Earlier this week, a federal judge determined that several residents and an animal legal defense nonprofit can take their fight to a local California court despite the bankruptcy of the 300,000-resident city, which was filed in June 2012 and can shield it from new legal actions.
The residents and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that investigates animal abuse, have accused the city’s animal shelter of prematurely euthanizing animals since 2008, according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Sacramento, Calif.
After digging into public records that covered a nine-month period, the group’s lawyers said they discovered that shelter officials prematurely killed 322 healthy cats and dogs before a state-mandated holding period expired.
Mandatory animal-holding periods stem, in part, from a California law called the Hayden Act, which was enacted in 1998. The law was intended to reduce euthanasia rates across the state’s shelters by encouraging shelter workers to find homes for stray and abandoned animals. Among other things, the law sets mandatory holding periods for those animals.
For most animals that ended up in Stockton’s shelters, the minimum holding period is at least four days, according to court papers. The residents claim, however, that shelter workers were miscounting the days when figuring out how long they are required to hold impounded animals before euthanizing them, according to court papers.
A spokeswoman for the city of Stockton declined to comment on the allegations, citing its broad policy not to comment on ongoing litigation.
The group also alleged in court papers that shelter workers denied proper care to sick animals and treated dogs who were classified as pit bulls “in a particularly inhumane fashion,” according to court papers. Public records showed that unclaimed dogs that were labeled as pit bulls were euthanized at a rate of 90%, which is higher than the 58% rate for all unclaimed dogs, the group said in court papers.
One resident said in court papers that she took in Gracie, Xena, Siouxie, Fiona, Luna, Ozzie, Sadie and Sebastian, whom the shelter classified as pit bulls, because she thought that their designation put them at risk of being prematurely euthanized.
The animal defense group said they used the term “pit bull” in court papers “even though the term is a misnomer commonly applied to dogs from various breeds that share a particular appearance and that are perceived to be dangerous.”
The recent decision from U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Christopher Klein allows the group to turn to California’s local court system in its bid to stop the city and its shelter from violating the state’s euthanasia rules. Cities that are in bankruptcy usually can’t be the target of new legal actions unless a judge gives special permission.
The city’s lawyers told Judge Klein that they were fine with the group’s pursuit of a cease-and-desist order as long as those actions didn’t hurt the city’s finances by, for example, pursuing monetary damages.
Stockton’s leaders put the city into bankruptcy on June 28, 2012, blaming the real-estate crash that crippled its tax revenue.
The city, located about 80 miles inland from San Francisco, was declared “ground zero” for the subprime-mortgage crisis by Judge Klein. He has also blamed the city’s financial woes on former leaders who offered overly generous pay to city workers and took on debt for new projects that the city couldn’t afford.
Stockton leaders have put together a bankruptcy-exit plan that calls for both cost cutting and revenue increases, but Judge Klein set aside several days in March for the city’s bondholders and other creditors who may protest that plan. Federal bankruptcy rules state that the city’s plan must be “fair and equitable.”
Write to Katy Stech at katy.stech@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @KatyStech.
from WordPress http://ift.tt/MCxUJg
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment