Mendez steps down from shelter management; board search is on for new executive director

By María Eugenia Guerra

“When I came on board 16 years ago, our annual budget was $89,000. We housed about 70 to 80 animals a day, and we had eight employees. We still have only eight employees, but we are housing an average of 250 animals a day and work to maintain a budget of about $400,000,” said Isabel Mendez, retiring executive director of the Laredo Animal Protective Society (LAPS), the shelter established by the Devine sisters, Ella and Jennie, 50 years ago.

“I'm happy with what I have done here, which was to run the shelter. I feel that the greater majority of Laredo is grateful that the shelter is here and has operated,” she said. “We have taken the responsibility for the county and the city. The shelter should be a priority for Webb County , but it is not.

“We've done what we can with what we have to help as many animals as possible, maybe not to the satisfaction of everybody, but I like to think that perhaps we have made the animals' lives a little bit better,” Mendez said. She leaves her post March 31.

“Isabel has done a good job for a very long time on a very small budget,” said LAPS board member Jennie Reed. “She has been a very good representative for the shelter.”

Board member Diana Salinas Farias concurred. “I'd be the first to say that Isabel and Enrique have been very hard workers. We are very appreciative of their efforts. Isabel has worn many hats as director, and it is going to be hard to follow in her footsteps,” Farias said. “The shelter has been doing the job for the county and the city. Both of those entities really need to think hard about how they will fund the shelter so that it works for everyone. We've done without for a long time and just gotten by with donations. I don't think we can continue to operate like this,” Farias said, referring to ever-increasing animal intakes -- about 10,000 in 2003 -- and euthanization of about 80 percents of those intakes.

Veterinarian Dr. Phyllis Voltz Creamer said of Mendez, “She has spent countless hours in a job that has been painful and stressful. She has done much to give back to this community, educating our children so they learn animals are a responsibility.”

“I had been told by my board that I could quit when I found my own replacement,” said Mendez. “My replacement would have learned on the job, and when he or she became the director, I would stay on as the assistant. That was how I thought it would go,” Mendez said, adding, “I've needed to leave this position. I have grown weary and felt someone new should come in.”

Renée LaPerrière de Gutiérrez was just such a director-in-training for three and a half months in 2004. LaPerrière de Gutiérrez, an animal lover and a former university librarian who is completing a master's in public administration -- and who recently completed the U.S. Humane Society's on-line Executive Leadership certification program, with courses in strategic management, statistics, board building, and promotion and publicity -- was an excellent candidate for the shelter's new ED.

If only she wanted the job.

“The more I learned about how other shelters are operated, the more I learned about the state laws that govern the operation of a shelter, the more I knew how out of compliance we were here in Laredo and the more daunting the job looked,” LaPerrière de Gutiérrez said. After attending a U.S. Humane Society sponsored Animal Expo in March 2004, at which she learned how shelter operations should be sanitized to keep highly contagious diseases like parvo and distemper at bay, as well as other aspects of shelter operation, she came home thinking the LAPS operation was more of a death camp than a shelter. LaPerrière de Gutiérrez's thought would take substantive form with the unfortunate news that of five dogs adopted at the Shelter's November 2004 PetFest, all five were diagnosed with distemper and four died. Another pet adopted at the shelter in December of 2004 also died of distemper.

LaPerrière de Gutiérrez was also troubled by the shelter's state-mandated annual inspection and by the shelter's euthanasia practices. The 2004 annual inspection of the Laredo facility, said LaPerrière de Gutiérrez, the inspection of June 16, 2004, was done over lunch at Tony Roma's rather than at the shelter. She said she witnessed Laredo veterinarian Dr. Voltz Creamer “pencil whip” the two-page inspection that made no mention of some of the shortfalls LaPerrière de Gutiérrez and shelter volunteers had discussed and documented -- pens with dirt floors; un-posted Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs); outside premises that did not minimize insect and rodent harborage; lack of posted protocol for euthanasia; lack of hot water for washing and sanitizing hands, animal dishes, and equipment; the failure to separate animals by sex; no posted SOP for the handling of quarantined animals; and no documentation of twice-daily observation of quarantined animals.

Despite those shortfalls, Dr. Voltz Creamer gave the shelter a “satisfactory” rating, which is identical to the inspection form on which she signed off for 2003. According to LaPerrière de Gutiérrez, Dr. Voltz Creamer mentioned at that June 16, 2004 lunch meeting with her and Mendez that she had visited the shelter two months prior to filling out the report. LaPerrière de Gutiérrez called Voltz Creamer's assessment of the shelter as “half-truths” in a letter of resignation she tendered to Mendez two days after the Tony Roma “inspection.”

“I have routinely visited the shelter over 21 years, at least two times a year. I had done a walk-through shortly before signing off on the June 16 inspection form,” said Dr. Voltz Creamer. “I had understood that visit was a training session with Renée. We met socially rather than at the shelter. We thought we were going through step by step with what the problems were with the shelter. The important thing to note is that the way I signed the paperwork, is how Dr. Laura Robinson of the Texas Department of Health filled out the exact same paperwork and also found everything in compliance.”

“The issue of euthanasia at the shelter crystallized everything for me,” said LaPerrière de Gutiérrez. According to state law, an animal must be unconscious or heavily sedated before an intracardial injection of sodium pentobarbital. Needles must be sterilized, undamaged, and of a size appropriate for the species of animal. Animals must be weighed before being euthanized to determine the correct dose of sodium pentobarbital.

Alfredo Flores, who until recently was a LAPS employee certified by the Humane Society of America to perform euthanasia, held to the state-mandated protocol of sedating and then injecting with sodium pentobarbital. “Before the state-mandated protocol it used to be three men wrestling with a dog, a snare around the dog's neck, no sedation, a dull needle, whoops, wrong side, flip the animal over, restrain it and another shot with the same dull needle. It's gruesome,” he said, adding that the shelter needs a euthanasia room that is stocked and supplied, with meds under lock and key as mandated for controlled substances by the DEA.

Flores also took issue with the procedure for intake of animals. “They should be dipped and given a plastic ID tag for starters. Healthy animals should be kept separate from the sick. The rat population at the shelter is staggering. There should be no dirt pens. That is fertile ground for the spreading of highly contagious diseases. We are procreating parasites,” Flores said. “Everyone has lost track of the number one priority of the shelter -- the welfare of the animals.” Flores resigned recently from the position as one of the shelter's two certified euthanizers.

Monica García, who was elected to the LAPS board last November, observed sick animals being removed from pens as they went to euthanization. “Those pens, uncleaned and unsterilized, were used to house new incoming animals. The sick animal was replaced with a new one which was now exposed to the disease of the first animal,” García said.

“I discovered an older Chihuahua that was taxed with a litter of puppies and a temperature of 104° and a uterine infection. She was dying slowly and receiving no medical attention. A shelter worker told me, ‘She's old. She is sick and ready to die.' I took her to a veterinarian who diagnosed her and cared for her,” García said.

“The most horrific and inhumane incident I witnessed was a pit bull that was hit by a car on a Friday evening near my parents' home in North Laredo. It ended up at the shelter with no care over the weekend. No one dealt with it until the euthanizing began at 1 p.m. on Monday. It suffered all those hours in a dark corner,” García said.

Board member Cynthia Gonzalez said she would like to see changes that improve animal health in the shelter. “In light of the rise of parvo and distemper in the shelter, those very contagious diseases should be treated as an epidemic,” she said.

“The number of animals in the pens, the mixing of males and females is a problem,” said Olga Lope, a school teacher with a ten-year history of volunteerism at the shelter. “The mixing of genders is against the law. In a pen with too many dogs and one dish per 10 dogs, the alpha dogs will keep the others from eating. Food and water will be spilled and no one will eat or drink. It isn't uncommon to see animals breed, which is a terrible irony considering the shelter's mission to educate about the necessity to spay and neuter,” she said.

“When I brought up the mixing of the males and females to one of the workers at the shelter, he said, ‘Let them have their fun. They just have three days to live,'” Gonzalez recalled.

“I have seen animals with open wounds left untended in the shelter,” Lope said. “Animals that should have been put out of their misery.”

“Abusers of animals need to be held culpable. The shelter needs to see to that,” said Flores, the former LAPS employee. “The shelter sees firsthand what people do to animals. We had a pit bull brought in around the first of the year whose neck had literally grown into its collar. The neck was an open wound. You could see the dog swallowing water. That should have been prosecuted,” he said.

Lope said that over the course of a decade she has seen few improvements in the physical plant. “Why haven't we installed the bathtubs for dipping given to us by the Women's City Club last fall?”

Gonzalez said volunteers could be kept busy every hour that the shelter is open. “They could help staff clean the kennels better. They can feed, walk, bathe, and groom the animals, and most importantly, socialize them so that they will be good candidates for adoption,” she said, adding that as a former shelter volunteer with a history of experience working with animals in a clinic setting, her volunteer efforts were not always welcome at the shelter.

“When I volunteered to bottle feed a litter of seven newborn pups at the shelter that were being given canned dog food and couldn't eat it -- their eyes were not even open -- I was told I would have to buy the formula and bottles myself. This, in spite of a $200 donation I had made the week before to the shelter,” García said.

“Urine and feces are hosed off of the seven concrete runs in the prohibited (from the public) area,” she continued. “Without drainage to carry it off, the runoff goes to the common area where workers walk through it and carry it to all other parts of the shelter on their shoes. In a row of pens you have one continuous gutter at the front that the runoff of each pen goes into. In essence, urine and feces and disease and water can run through each pen.”

García chairs the LAPS board search committee for a new director. She said she has expectations that the addition of new board members last fall will make a difference in reorganizing the shelter and giving it direction for remediation and compliance. “Our meetings are more structured and more productive,” she said. “Our mission will no longer be to limp by or keep our heads above water. I have the sense that the longtime board members want to work together to identify problem areas and make plans to address them. We are all in agreement that funding is a high priority, but so is the area of management,” she said, adding that she perceives a staffing structure for the shelter that includes an executive director, an operations director, an animal care manager, animal care technicians, and a position for fund development.

“Our new board members have brought us new interest, new rules, and heightened awareness,” said board member Reed. “Some of us have gone to visit shelters elsewhere. We're going to be here for a while and we need to make the most of what we have. We want to make the best plan possible to go out to ask for funding and grants,” she said.

“My great aunts established the shelter with the help of a few people who loved animals. It was a simple little humane society -- the Devine Sisters Shelter for Animals. Ella was the sparkplug and Jennie was the detail person,” Reed said, adding, “By the time they died, the city had grown. Over decades, the number of strays has become enormous. The city passed the leash law, and we became the impoundment facility for Laredo and Webb County.”

García said the shelter was looking for a director with hands-on management skills, a director who would adhere to a management first-in, first-out policy for supervisory and security purposes, adding that a job description would be provided so that reviews could help evaluate the ED's performance. “We need to comply with city ordinances and state statutes and OSHA provisions for employee safety – eyewash stations, first aid, all those things that make the shelter a safer place to work,” she said.

“It's unfortunate that the shelter has waited until crisis mode to approach our local government officials. City and county budgets are not drawn up overnight, and the shelter is not a government agency. The shelter has a contractual relationship with the City and should not have waited this long to ask for more help,” García continued.

“It's OK to ask for help when you are overwhelmed,” García said. “I don't know why Isabel found it hard to ask. There are so many volunteers who really want to help, but she's very proprietary about her role at the shelter.”

“You deal with things,” Mendez said. “I was given a job to do, and I was doing it. I had a board I reported to every month. I never encountered anything that I didn't think I could handle.”