Alright, council, we'll go ahead and call our work session meeting to order with all of our elected officials present.

Three items on the agenda today.

First up, uh Nate Slack is gonna walk us through an animal shelter discussion or presentation.

All right, hello everybody.

I sent you guys an email a few hours ago.

If you haven't seen it, um it is in your inbox.

Just a PowerPoint presentation.

It shouldn't take very long.

Just wanted to give you guys an update on animal control and some of the stuff that we've been doing.

Um over the past year, I've been working pretty closely with uh Lieutenant Arnoldson and Trish Watson, just making sure that we don't have too many animals in animal control um building, which was originally Stone Ridge, obviously, and now in our shelter.

Um yeah, so just I guess next slide.

Uh just quick chain of command.

So it's been going into Trish when Trish picks up an animal, she gives the photo and all the information to Lieutenant Arnoldson, and then he emails that to me, and then um I just get that up on the website quick as possible just because if people are missing their dog, they're kind of frantic, and so it's good to get that up quick.

Um go to the next slide.

So on the on the website changes, there hasn't been a ton I've changed.

Um the the original look was just kind of boring and people weren't spending a lot of time on there.

Um so I've updated it, there's a lot more links.

It also talks about how there's no volunteer opportunities currently at the shelter, um, talks about how you can donate items, and also directs you where to go if you want to adopt a pet or if there's impounded pets.

Um so it just it matches the branding and the fill for all of our other web pages, so it's just kind of something I've been working on.

Um, website numbers.

There's been a little bit of a dip from last year.

Um it's nothing like of concern.

It's just because uh you'll see on the next slide that there's we don't have as many animals as we had last year, and so obviously when there's more animals, there's gonna be more visitors.

I think the more uh interesting thing here is is just that there's uh people are averaging 48 seconds on each page, and the rest of our website is around like six or seven seconds.

Um, and that's just because people can click on something and they're like, oh, I I didn't mean to click on that, they back out, they go somewhere else.

But 48 seconds on a page is uh it's it's pretty lengthy.

Um so this this is where it starts to get interesting.

So adoptable animals.

There was a big spike in uh December of 2023.

This this line chart shows from July 2023 until uh current day, and it kind of ebbs and flows.

There's not a whole lot of rhyme or reason as to why we get a lot at one time.

Um it can be the economy, it can just be people losing their pets, they go on vacation, they come back and they're gone.

Um so there's not really a reason why it it spikes and it dips at times.

Um, with the exception of at the start of this calendar year, is when we started to make that little transition because we were gonna be going away from Stone Ridge.

Um, when they got wind of that, they had a bigger effort to help us get rid of the animals.

Um obviously having 30 there wasn't ideal.

Um and then when they didn't have the uh when they didn't know for sure if we're gonna be a no-kill shelter or not, I think that really kicked things in the high drive for them.

Um so they started working with shelters to make sure that uh animals were getting out by the time that we had our own facility.

And so you can see from uh November 2024 to January 2025.

We lost probably 20 animals during that time.

Um loss is probably not the best way to put that.

We these animals survived, they were uh relocated, we'll say.

Um, but it's it's kind of cool that we haven't had more than 10 at a time since the start of the year.

So it just kind of shows that what we're doing right now is working.

Uh that's the next slide.

What has and hasn't been working.

Um so there's there's kind of some low-hanging fruit, and that would be working with the local rescues and kind of putting it on blast on social media.

These two things haven't worked super great.

One is because I reached out to the shelter, the local shelters that are um on the slide probably a dozen times over the last year, and I've never received any feedback.

So I've never had an answered call, I've never had an answered email.

Um, I've left voicemails, and I've never heard back from any of them.

Um I don't know if it's just because we're we're a city, so they don't necessarily want to work with us.

Um if they have preconceived notions about Riverton City or something because of something Stoners may have said, I I don't know.

But we haven't had a whole lot of of luck working with them.

Umcial media is interesting because we have we have more Facebook followers than anybody in the valley.

Um which is something we've been really trying to build up.

The problem with that is we can have 22,000 followers, but it doesn't mean that we have people who are interested in adopting pets.

And if they're interested in adopting pets, it doesn't mean they're interested in adopting the kind of pets that we have at the shelter.

So they may be looking for a girl dog or a boy dog or a certain breed um or a certain age, and it's uh to my knowledge, we haven't been able to have any animals adopted because of social media posts.

Um the posts do really well.