Years ago, Karen Patterson found a dog on the side of the road and decided to drop him off at the Odessa Animal Shelter. The certified public accountant changed her mind as soon as she learned the shelter had a high euthanasia rate. She kept the dog, named him Roscoe and two years ago she started Fix West Texas.
Fix West Texas is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing low cost spaying and neutering services, microchips and vaccinations to folks in Odessa, Midland and beyond.
After meeting Roscoe that day, Patterson said she quickly discovered there were no low-cost clinics in the area. Veterinarians were charging anywhere from $300 to $900 to spay and neuter dogs and had long, long wait lines due to a shortage of vets in the area, she said.
So Patterson said she and a friend decided to help address the problem on their own.
They called around and found a handful of vets who were willing to sign a contract and take turns to fly into Midland for a few days at a time to provide services.
Originally, Patterson and her co-founder operated four to five days a month moving from the Odessa Police Department’s annex to Floyd Gwin Park to the Midland Horseshoe Arena. Now, thanks to grants, donations and service revenues, Fix West Texas has a home in Midland and they strive to open 20 days a month, the dates of which are announced via Facebook.
The organization has an annual budget of roughly $1 million, 12 paid employees and four volunteers. Since its inception, roughly 11,000 spays and neuters have been performed and each animal is microchipped and vaccinated at the same time, she said.
Many of the surgeries performed are tied to a voucher program funded by the City of Midland and Midland County, Patterson said. The city last year provided Fix West Texas $230,000 and the county supplied $150,000 so qualifying residents can obtain a $70 voucher toward the cost of a spay or neuter.
Those vouchers essentially cover the cost of the surgery, Patterson said.
Now, she wants to convince the City of Odessa and Ector County to do the same thing.
Patterson pitched her idea to the Odessa City Council last month and intends to do the same Tuesday night.
Now that the city has invested in a new shelter, Patterson said she thinks it’s time to address the reason why the shelter is always filled with stray, lost and abandoned cats and dogs.
“Now’s the time where we can change our practices and invest in preventing the births instead of housing and then killing half of those we house because right now we’re spending a lot of money on housing animals just to kill them,” Patterson told the council April 19.
Patterson also expressed her disappointment that the city opted not to sign a memo of understanding with Best Friends Animal Society, a national non-profit that provided the city a 15-page analysis of the current shelter’s operations and wanted to teach shelter employees best practices by embedding an employee at the shelter for up to a year.
Best Friends was willing to provide $100,000 worth of services to the city for free in order to help the city reach a 90% live-release rate. Right now, animal control officers euthanize more than 50% of the animals they find in the field or see at the shelter, Patterson said.
Patterson was told at the meeting the city rejected the idea because they didn’t want to abdicate responsibilities to another agency. Shelter director Kelley Hendricks is doing a fine job, they said.
“(The contract’s) not really set up to replace a shelter director, it’s someone to advise the animal director, so as a partnership. I hate that Kelley sees it that way. But when you’re euthanizing 52% of animals, I would beg for help and to have someone say ‘Here’s free help valued at $100,000’ and our city said ‘No, we don’t really want that because our guy’s doing good,’ we’ve gone from 30% kill to 52% kill. I can’t get my head wrapped around that,” Patterson said.
Patterson questioned Hendrick’s job qualifications and why such a large number of dogs are being euthanized for being “aggressive.” Best Friends could help animal control officers determine which animals are truly aggressive and which ones are acting aggressively simply because of the circumstances they’ve found themselves in at the shelter.
In addition to providing recommendations to city staff in terms of medical care, housing cleaning protocols and bookkeeping practices, Best Friends also identified communication and culture issues within the shelter. In a report written in February 2021, the shelter’s staff “distrusts” the community to a certain extent, going so far as to create a “do not adopt” list prohibiting anyone who has returned an animal from ever adopting again.
The report’s authors went on to say the staff has a lack of understanding about the role of today’s animal control agencies and suffers from compassion fatigue and burnout. Too many duties were being handled by too few people and “the current volunteer and foster programs lack formal structure; there are no official trainings, no handbooks, no shadowing or mentoring programs,” the report stated.
In addition, new programs were introduced without training and explanation and there were silos within the various department, the report stated.
More than 4,500 animals were euthanized overall last year in Odessa and 52,000 killed statewide, Patterson said.
Working with rescue groups is great, but it won’t solve the issue, Patterson told the council.
“We always say we can’t adopt our way out of the problem. We can’t transport our way out of the problem. The only thing we can do really is reduce literally. We have to reduce the unwanted litters,” Patterson said. “The responsible thing to do is to spay and neuter and that’s what we’re hoping with you guys’s help, that we can really communicate to the city residents that this is what the city wants. We don’t want any more stray free roaming dogs. We want to be able to use our parks. We want our kids to be able to enjoy our parks and we also want it to be a healthy place for our pets.”
Odessa Police Chief Michael Gerke and council member Detra White defended shelter manager Kelley Hendricks and her staff in interviews last week and said the city is doing the best it can with a difficult situation, especially given a lack of resources. The city did not sign an agreement with Best Friends because Hendricks has already implemented many of the suggestions the organization provided, they said.
“Those people that work at the shelter, those employees they care about their job. They are some of the lowest paid employees in the City of Odessa. If they didn’t care about their job, they wouldn’t be doing that job. Certainly they could find other jobs, that are paying more and they would be less stressful. It just is what it is,” Gerke said.
There were some management issues when Hendricks took over the shelter, but she’s worked them out, Gerke said. In addition, there hasn’t been any disease outbreaks at the shelter in more than a year.
“That fact stands on its own,” Gerke said.
The chief also insisted that 98% of the animals euthanized by the city are ill or injured.
White agreed and said that because diseases like Parvo are so highly contagious, the shelter staff simply can’t run the risk of them spreading shelter-wide. In addition, trying to nurse them back to health is also an expensive proposition.
The chief said he believes there is simply a “personality conflict” between Patterson and Hendricks. The bottom line is everyone agrees more people need to be spaying and neutering their animals, the question remains, however, what is the best way to make sure that gets done.
Patterson believes most people aren’t getting their animals fixed due to resources; Gerke and White think most people just are philosophically opposed to doing so.
”I would love to be a no kill shelter. I don’t think we’ll ever get to that point, but I’d love to get as close as we possibly could,” Gerke said. “We’ve kind of taken a step back from where we were, we have lost some ground, but we’re going to make that ground up. Our goal is to work hard, but I think criticizing the staff and creating an atmosphere where there’s more friction…We’re all trying to work towards the same goal. The last thing you want to do, to me, is hurt those relationships. You try to build relationships not burn them down.”
The deal with Best Friends wouldn’t have been appropriate, Gerke said.
“They did give some advice. We followed some of their advice. It’s just when we got down to signing contracts some of the things they wanted we didn’t find acceptable. Basically, they wanted more or less control of the shelter and the fact that those are tax dollars paid by citizens of Odessa… I’m OK with being advised. I just don’t think that it was appropriate to turn that over.”
Gerke said the city is doing its best to educate the community about responsible pet ownership, ie spaying and neutering animals, microchipping them and getting them vaccinated, through Facebook, the city’s website and speaking engagements.
If money were no issue, Gerke said he’d love to have a veterinarian on staff at the shelter to perform procedures and even to go out into the community to hold vaccination clinics, but money is an issue.
Right now the city contracts with a Colorado City vet who performs procedures once a week at the shelter, he said. It turns out that arrangement is more cost effective than using Fix West Texas, he said.
As for a voucher program, Gerke said he’d want to make sure the citizens the most in need would benefit, but noted there are a lot of other departments within the city that have needs and will be asking for additional funding this budget season.
“I know each department is going to come forth with some requests. I mean, I think we all know that there’s issues with infrastructure with roads and water and sewer lines and things like that,” Gerke said.
White expressed similar thoughts.
“I am not against the voucher program. I am not against it, but I don’t know how much we would be able to provide them,” White said. “We’re talking about tax money, you know, and so we have to be good stewards of that. It’s kind of one of those stand in line. Habitat for Humanity has approached us many times with their needs. We have the food bank, we have so many entities and now that groceries have gone so high and gasoline has gone so high we have to be good stewards.”
