This joint meeting of the Lakewood City Council's Public Safety Committee and the Lakewood Animal Safety & Welfare Advisory Board (LASWAB) focused on Ordinance 20-2025, which updates Chapter 505 (Animals and Fowl) and creates regulations for Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) of community cats. Key discussions centered on registration requirements, caregiver protections, and training, with a motion passed to direct the law department to incorporate registration and training for community cat caregivers and remove the Director of Public Safety approval requirement.
Okay, everybody, let's get started. I'll call this public safety meeting to order at 740 on Monday, June 23rd, 2025. We have uh some guests with us today, including um Emily Christique and Carol Carol Vloch Vlack Vlotch. It's one of those. You got my name right on that one. Like and a couple other ladies that I I've seen here, and I'm sorry, I don't know your name, so if you could introduce yourselves to us again. Megan Galata. Megan Galata. With the Citizens Committee for Lakewood's Animals and Shelter, CCLAS or Clause. Thank you. There you go. We also have uh Director Ernie Fargo from the law department here, and Mr. Crumley, uh the animal control supervisor, and a full city council tonight. Um so we're going to look at some information. Um, Mr. Vargo and Mr. Crumley, um, I sent you an email today with a communication in it from um Miss Vlach Lascher and Miss Christy Q. And um, did you have a chance to look at that? Did you get a get that email? Yes, uh, Madam Chair, uh, I did. And let me apologize uh to start. Uh Jen Swallow has worked with La Swab closely on the drafting, and Jen is ill. I spoke to her, she's she was gonna come in, but she's very ill. So I said I'll do my best. Um I will tell you from a from a big picture standpoint. Um there's only one issue that really needs to be ironed out. Everything else is a drafting issue, and uh we're like-minded, I believe. Um that's my big picture assessment, Madam Chair. Great. Well, well, maybe we'll have a short meeting then. Um everybody, I think on the on the committee here had a chance to look at that um councilwoman Marks and Councilman Baker. And um, I couldn't send it out to everybody, but I think some copies were distributed here. So we we wanted to look at um the recommendation. So I'm gonna turn it over to you, uh, Emily, and let you have some opening comments for us here on this communication. Okay. Can you hear me? Yeah. Thank you so much. First of all, we've been working on this for about two years, and it seems like such a long road, but we're we're close. So I appreciate everyone's time um and effort here. Um back to the memo that we sent. It feels kind of silly to read all the way through it, but I'm gonna start um just for sake of record. Thank you. Okay, so in September of 2024, LaSwab issued a report to council and the administration regarding TNR in Lakewood. We were pleased to have their support discussing ways to update and clarify the city ordinances. In the meantime, TNR was being performed throughout Lakewood using temporary updated policies and procedures, which had been drafted in agreement with animal control. Since that time, LaSwab is aware of only one consistent CCLAS volunteer that has dedicated their time to follow these current updated policies, which includes completing an online training, submitting an application for each property, and reporting back to animal control on each occurrence of TNR performed. If a resident calls animal control about stray cat populations, animal control frequently has referred residents to this clause volunteer for assistance with TNR throughout the past year. This volunteer has carried the responsibility of helping residents with paperwork, training, trapping, transporting, and overnighting the cats. She has consistently been clocking in 20 hours of work per week.