Moving Forward: Maintaining No Kill Through Measurement

Aug 07, 2019

Yesterday, the City of Austin announced that they chose Don Bland to be the next Chief Animal Services Officer. As you know, this is a hiring process that we have been critical of and that we believe highlighted some gaps in the way our city is planning to sustain No Kill. Obviously, Don is not responsible for that and needs to be given the opportunity to succeed here. Today, we fully commit to doing everything we can to make Don and Austin Animal Center (AAC) successful.

We left our recent conversations with city leadership believing that there is not enough awareness or knowledge at the higher government levels to ensure that our No Kill status, under any new Chief Animal Services Officer, will succeed and improve. While this is somewhat understandable considering how complex the shelter system is when saving this number of lives, we suggest a multi-prong approach moving forward to address two key gaps:

• No Kill-Specific Metric Reports: There must be more than an annual 95%+ metric in place. When the only measurement of success is an overall annual number, it leaves vast room for error in the methodology used to reach that annual result. It is critical that incremental measurements are taken in various areas feeding up to that annual goal. Those measurements can then be used to determine if the system is on the right path. This approach allows for slight operational adjustments along the way for improved chances of success, as well as opportunities for intervention if major misses are occurring.
• Consistency of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): AAC has SOPs in place for some, though not all, of the most critical functions of lifesaving, particularly as they pertain to activities that affect APA!’s ability to help AAC save lives. The problem is that the SOPs are subject to change with any new director, and often are changed or not enforced at all. We have been through four new directors (including interims) in the last eight years and each one does things differently, often without understanding the history behind the SOPs or the effect that changes have on our lifesaving abilities. Creating consistency within SOPs allows for lifesaving abilities to be maximized based on historical knowledge, data, and experience.

We believe that whenever we voice concerns, solutions must also be brought forward. We think that APA! can be most helpful in the following ways:

1. Work collaboratively with the city staff to ensure our current Memorandums of Understandings that surround our collaborative work with the city are followed again as soon as possible. We will work with Don so that he can understand what these are and what they protect.
   
2. Ask Council to pass a resolution that enforces proposed monthly key performance indicators to show how well operations are delivering expected outcomes towards 95% every month. We believe this should be in a council resolution rather than solely driven by staff to ensure consistency when there is leadership turnover.
3. Creating a dashboard or report to display and make key performance indicators more visible and understandable to stakeholders and citizens. Some suggestions we have are:
   1. Monthly live release rate by species (in addition to annual).
   2. Intakes and outcome numbers and percentages that match previous high performing years, which are now considered “best practices” through the American Pets Alive! model.
   3. Notes on any aberrations in the numbers.
   4. Data collection and statistic sharing that shows the efficacy of programs in place such the Sheltered/Neuter/Release program for community cats, Pet Resource Center that helps owners keep their pets, etc. (Please watch for my next blog post that will outline the American Pets Alive! model of 12 ingredients that keep our city No Kill to understand better what the reporting would be aligned with.)

Oversight occurs when individuals pay attention. When oversight is used to oversee the issues at hand, we can catch potential problems as they arise, and ensure that nothing currently being done will cause problems later. As tax paying citizens, we all have a right to expect oversight. We know that the city council wants our city to be No Kill. Austin Pets Alive! is committed to No Kill, transparency, and working with the city to implement the measurements needed to hold ourselves accountable to the standards we’ve set together for No Kill in Austin. There are current problems, there have been past problems, and there will be future problems. Oversight is the only way to prevent the replaying of old major problems over and over so we can progress to our potential.

Right now, we ask that you email City Council and ask for council-directed policy to oversee the performance metrics that lead to 95% live outcome. This will create the sustainability that is needed for Austinites now and for the next generation of No Kill advocates.

We are at an important juncture in Austin’s No Kill journey, and in this moment, we can make it or break it. We know that 11 years into making Austin No Kill, we can’t have the same battles year after year getting SOPs back in place to reflect the animals’ and No Kill’s needs. We have a lot to be proud of and we truly believe that we can sustain our successes, and build upon them, to save even more lives together.

Thank you,

Ellen Jefferson, DVM