Volunteers and rescue partners told the Animal Advisory Commission that the shelter’s transition from Chameleon to ShelterBuddy has disrupted daily operations and sharply reduced animals’ visibility to adopters.

“Dogs don’t have six months to wait for visibility,” said a volunteer who spoke during the ShelterBuddy update, describing a migration that began May 5 and whose problems have persisted through November. Several speakers said volunteers could no longer access behavior notes on demand, profiles and photos disappeared after edits, and the shelter’s Petfinder feed stopped updating in May.

“We were told the change would take about one week,” a volunteer said. “It’s now been six months.” Heather Myers, a volunteer and local attorney, called the outage “a failure of core functions” and said the vendor problems have limited volunteers’ ability to help adopters and increased staff burden; volunteers now must request records from a single employee who can only process a limited number of requests per week.

Mary Brown, program manager on the customer-service/project team, summarized the procurement and implementation timeline and said the vendor was chosen after a formal RFP and mapping process. She listed benefits gained since migration — cloud/mobile access for staff, bulk updates, two‑way adoption integration — but acknowledged several outstanding items: volunteer access controls, reliable two-way integration with AdoptAPet (Adopets) and automatic feeds to Petfinder, inconsistent public web profiles and reports required for commissions.

Interim Director Rolando Fernandez and Interim Chief Administrative Officer Melissa Poole said the issues have been escalated to the city’s technology and procurement teams and to the vendor. Fernandez described a vendor limitation: ShelterBuddy lacks role-based firewalls adequate to expose only marketing and behavior fields to volunteers without exposing private owner data. As a workaround, staff are exploring a separate interface that would allow volunteers to query limited fields without directly logging into ShelterBuddy.

“We communicated our expectations to vendors and have an escalation path,” Poole said, adding that the project team has added CTM (city technology) staff to push fixes and that some updates already show improvement.

Volunteers and commissioners pressed for concrete timelines and for the department to restore automatic reports (nightly risk reports that rescues relied on) and Petfinder integration. Staff said they have prioritized volunteer access, two‑way integration and ordinance reports, and will return with written timelines and progress updates.

What’s next: Staff said they will provide commissioners with status updates and timelines as vendor commitments firm up; they are exploring an interim interface or data feeds to restore volunteer access while vendor-level role permissions are developed.