Palm Desert approves 3-year animal-services contract with Riverside County amid calls for greater transparency

The Palm Desert City Council on Sept. 9 approved a three-year contract with Riverside County Animal Services to continue field response, shelter and licensing work and to fund vaccination, microchip and spay/neuter clinics, with expanded reporting and quarterly meetings.

The agreement calls for a phased-in rate schedule over three years, quarterly billing with annual reconciliation and regular reports to the city. Assistant City Manager Richard Canoni told the council the city is budgeting roughly $500,000 for year one and that costs are expected to rise in years two and three as the county phases in new rates. Canoni said the county will provide standard reports at no charge and up to 12 hours annually for special reports; additional work would be billed at the contract's listed rates.

The county will continue the city's standard field-services plan; staff recommended against moving to an expanded seven-day-in-person field-service model because analysis showed weekend overtime utilization of about 5.5% and an estimated $287,000 annual cost for a full staffing expansion. Canoni said that, in recent months, staff and county analysts built an operations dashboard to track calls, overtime and bite investigations and that the county will help coordinate vaccination/microchip clinics and adoption events in Palm Desert.

At the meeting, Michael Phipps Russell, president of Loving All Animals and a member of the Coachella Valley Animal Campus Commission, praised the public study session and thanked staff for making the process public. He also pressed the county and council on four centralized donation subfunds and a state-mandated fee subfund with balances totaling about $1.1 million and $532,000 respectively and asked why only small amounts had been spent over recent years. Russell provided line-item figures cited to county reports and said he had received them after prolonged requests to county staff.

County and city staff responded that some donor and state-mandated subfunds are held for emergencies and that leadership changes in recent years constrained strategic spending; Kimberly Youngberg, assistant director for Riverside County Department of Animal Services, told the council the department is developing plans to spend and replenish targeted funds and that new leadership intends to be more proactive.

Council members pressed for transparency after the question-and-answer period. Mayor Pro Tem Truby and Council Member Quintanilla asked that the county provide the five-year historical budgets and detail for the subfunds and donation accounts. The council approved the three-year contract 5-0 with a direction that staff deliver additional documentation, including five years of budget and subfund detail, and to coordinate the clinics (a vaccination/microchip clinic in November and a spay/neuter clinic in January) and an associated adoption event.

The contract also requires the county to enforce the city's animal-control ordinance; staff said they will return in the fall with proposed municipal-code changes, including possible spay/neuter and microchipping requirements and a ban on backyard breeders, for the council's consideration.