Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council.

Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning.

Today is August 27th.

I'm honored to serve as the chair of the Health and Safety Committee.

We have an action packed agenda stored for us, but before we jump into our first action item, and then we have seven consent items.

I'll turn it over to city council members to introduce themselves.

I believe we have two council members that are online.

We'll start first with councilmember Flynn.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Uh Kevin Flynn representing Southwest members district two.

And producer Council President Pro Tem Romero Campbell join us yet.

I don't think so.

So why don't we start to my right?

Councilmember Gonzalez Gutierrez.

Sorry, I thought it was Councilman Verdi because she liked hooked up.

Hi everybody, Serena Gonzalez.

Okay, the goals are here.

Hi everybody, Sedana Gonzalez Gutierrez.

I'm one of your council members at large.

Good morning, Amanda Sawyer, District Five.

Good morning.

Chris Hines, Denver's Perfect Ten.

Morning, Amanda Sandoval, Northwest Hammer District Run.

And Sarah Verdi, your other council member at large.

All right.

One last check for Council President Pro Tem, seeing that she's not there, we will jump into the first action item.

Our colleague, Councilmember Hines, has an ordinance that he wants to share with us.

Councilmember Hollings have turned it over to you.

Thank you, Committee Chair.

Council members, thank you for uh for giving us the opportunity to present in budget and policy a few weeks ago and uh and for the opportunity for you to consider uh the case for prohibiting the sale of puppies, kittens, and bunnies um bred from mills uh from Denver pet stores.

So um if we could get the slides up on thank you.

Great.

So um uh let's just start with a problem statement.

Why do we need to ban um uh millbred puppy skippet kittens and rabbits?

Um uh first the the methods that are used for breeding are inherently cruel.

You see some of the uh some of the animals in cages here.

Um there are uh animals that are just in um horrible conditions that uh that's all they are meant to do is uh produce offspring that look cute um uh that can go for uh sometimes thousands of dollars.

So um uh sometimes those uh those uh the offspring, the puppies uh rabbits and kittens are bred so often that they have just um uh future medical expenses, sometimes months, sometimes years in advance.

And uh there's also a predatory scheme to finance these animals.

Uh some of these uh breeds go for thousands of dollars, which we'll see here in a minute.

Um, and uh when there are uh environments that are just meant to produce offspring uh for sale.

A lot of times those are um in environments that are not meant um uh to to protect the public health, and so there might be diseases that uh transmit from animals to humans.

Um we also have um, so I mentioned uh health and genetic issues that might not be apparent for months or years.

Um there uh part of the the challenge here, the uh the problem statement is that uh people will finance uh these adorable, you know, um uh best friends, and uh and sometimes those uh could be for thousands of dollars, and then someone's on the hook, and then unfortunately there's medical expenses that this uh you know the family's also on the hook for, and then the uh uh that cute um uh uh best friend passes away very early in their life, and um and the owners are still on the hook for those thousands of dollars that are required to purchase um the uh the animal.

So um sometimes these medical conditions are very expensive, and um, and so then the family chooses to uh to surrender uh that animal, the pet to um to a shelter, including uh Denver animal shelter, uh, which could be an extra burden on shelter resources, um, which uh equates to taxpayer um responsibility as well.

Um, so uh why should we uh step in?

I mean, after all, there's the you know uh USDA that um provides regulation.

Well, um they do and they don't.

Uh 40 percent of or excuse me, um uh 45% of the US day USDA licensed dog dealers in 2024 never had a compliance investigation.

Um, 20% of them uh that did get an investigation uh uncovered failures, and uh and most of the time there was no corrective action.

They said you didn't pass the test, and that's it.

So um, and then uh some of these uh violations are for veterinary issues, uh, sick, injured, or dead animals haven't never been uh given medical care or seen by our veterinarian.

Uh so it is happening here in Colorado.

This is a recent article in the uh in the Denver media, um, where they um a puppy mill rescue group, a group that that works just on uh puppy mills, pulled 165 schnauzers from a property in southwest Colorado, and um uh we saw several dogs with missing limbs or parts of limbs, likely due to the mat strangling and cutting off circulation and then limbs falling off.

They were just um the owners didn't care about these living creatures, they cared about profit above anything else.

Um the good news is that we don't have any pet stores that um uh that would be affected by this changing ordinance in Denver today.

Um so uh we've we've had some other conversations about banning things uh in the recent past where it would affect stores.

It really makes sense for us to do it uh to pass an ordinance now before we um uh have to consider the impact on um uh Denver residents who are employees or small business owners.