The Kansas City City Council held a business session on January 30, 2025, at 7:15 PM. The meeting included approval of minutes from December 19, 2024, and two major presentations: a report on a plan to insource animal control services, and a presentation from Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS) on a proposed $474 million bond measure for the April 2025 ballot. Council members engaged in discussion and asked questions, but no votes were taken on the substantive topics. The meeting concluded with a motion to enter closed session.
Welcome to business session. Our first item is approval of minutes for business session of December 19th, 2024. Is there a motion? Assembled. Second. All right. All in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. Motion passes. Our first item is a report to City Council on animal control services. This came from resolution 241043. I believe that was introduced by Councilwoman Patterson Hasley for that update. And uh here we are. Hey, good afternoon, everybody. All right, I'm Forrest Decker, the director of neighborhood services, and I'll be talking to you about your order to me to come back with a plan to insource animal control. So the first thing I'll do is I'm gonna discuss just a brief timeline to kind of get us up to date to where we're at. And then after that, I'll discuss uh specific plans for in-sourcing, then I'll go into a budget, and then I'll go into a timeline. So that's kind of gonna be the order of my presentation here. As far as timeline up to date, um, you can see it there, but pre-FY 2021, the city provided animal control services in August of 2020. The council voted to outsource animal control, including the call center and dispatch. Uh Kansas City Pet Project began uh providing that service as a contractor in FY21. That contract expired in April of 2024. We amended it for one year until April 20th or April 30th of 2025. We released an RFP in August of 2024 through October and November that RFPs uh the RFPs were scored and reviewed by a review committee, and on December 2nd, I came back to this body uh with a notification that RFPs have been rejected by the review committee, at which point council resolution 241043 was passed directing uh staff to prepare a plan to insource animal control. So that gets us to today. So the first thing in uh looking over uh how to prepare a plan to insource this is we went back and reviewed some past data. Uh, because believe it or not, I have very I have actually zero staff that were here whenever this happened in 2021. So we looked at the 2020 audit or the 2017 audit. And these were kind of some of the highlights of that audit. Uh that when the city was actually running animal control. Uh, the enforcement only focus was inefficient. There were strained relationships with KCE PET Project, who was running the animal control or the animal shelter at the time. There were inconsistent enforcement ordinances. There was underutilization of data. There was some gaps in staff training and some gaps in uh staff management. So we took all that under consideration as we were starting to develop a plan. We also looked very very closely at the two different contracts. There's a specific contract for the management of the shelter, and then there's a different contract for animal control. This kind of highlights what the different uh components of those contracts are, and I've seen a lot of stuff in the paper and on the news lately that kind of blur the lines between these, but they're actually two separate contracts that perform two very separate functions. Specifically with animal control, what we're talking about today, that contract and what our insourcing plan will discuss is strict compliance with all provisions of chapter 14 of the city's code of ordinances, call center and dispatch services, and collecting and reporting data. So then we moved on to uh kind of looking at what the components of chapter 14 were and how we would go about in-house uh in sourcing that component or that function. And obviously, the number one is enforcement of chapter 14 for community and animal safety. That's focusing on stray animals, pet licensing, spaying and neuter or newer neuter ordinances. And I'm gonna get to a slide later on that talks about all the other components of chapter 14 because it's actually quite a lengthy chapter. We would also want to develop uh public outreach component, public listening sessions and developing outreach tools, uh form uh strong relationships with stakeholders, and I'm gonna talk about each of these in a little bit more detail. Uh improving improving response times and accurately tracking those from request to resolution, and then data tracking needed for uh realization of key performance indicators and for utilization on forming the performance-based budget. And then data tracking needed for realization of key performance indicators and for utilization on forming the performance-based budget. So whenever we we kind of started looking at uh reach what stakeholders were in the Kansas City metro area, and we identified 35 pet pet hospitals and animal hospitals in Kansas City. Our plan would be to host meetings with all of those potential stakeholders, discussing our mutual goals, and uh just working on how we can work together better, holding stakeholder roundups, maybe even discuss setting up an advisory board comprised of members of these other stakeholders that came back to us with you know evaluations and advising on how we uh form processes and tweak those processes.