On a cold and rainy Thursday, Nov. 14 evening, the Guilford County Animal Services Advisory Board met with staff from the animal shelter, and one of the most exasperating problems identified was that county rules and regulations are causing the shelter workers to have to throw away perfectly good donated food, spend hours of valuable staff time categorizing every item that comes in, send daily reports to the county manager’s office and wait to hear back while storing the items in much-needed space in the meantime.

Before the spring of 2024, the donation operations at the shelter worked very well and even helped dogs and cats at the shelter get adopted. Shelter staff could, for instance, provide food, pet toys, leashes and other donated items to needy pet owners who didn’t want to surrender their pets but who also couldn’t afford to keep them in a bad economy.

Early in 2024, however, the Guilford County manager’s office began imposing a rule – which perhaps had previously existed but hadn’t been enforced – regarding how in-kind donations are handled by Guilford County Animal Services at the shelter.

The change led to significant disruptions in shelter operations and has resulted in aggravation for staff, and pet owners –  and has caused harm to the pets themselves.

Under these new policies, each and every donation to Guilford County Animal Services must be fully inventoried on a daily basis by staff. That employee must also estimate the value of each item and record the donation along with its assessed value.

It doesn’t matter what the item is: Even obviously useless things people simply drop off at the shelter, like broken hair dryers and old carpets, have to be inventoried.

Then, each inventory list must be approved by the Guilford County manager’s office before any of the items on the particular list can be used or discarded. The approval process can sometimes take several days, and, because of that, the animal shelter has become a warehouse – as one can see in the picture of the breakroom above.

 This takes up valuable space in an already cramped facility and staff have to keep exact track of which donations are included on which day’s inventory list so they know whether or not those items can finally be used or discarded.

Also, under the new rules, no donated items can be shared with the pet-owning public. Currently, if the items can’t be used at the shelter or by Animal Services, they must be discarded or warehoused in surplus storage.

Since the shelter has a food supply program in place with Hills Science Diet – and doesn’t just feed shelter animals whatever happens to be donated that week – the shelter currently has little use for donated food.

Before the new rules were put in place earlier this year, shelter staff had the ability to help pet owners who were adopting pets as well as those who were considering turning their pets over to the animal shelter. The ability to help those people created a supportive relationship and made it easier for economically challenged residents to become or to continue being pet owners.

The issue has been highly frustrating to shelter staff, volunteers and pet lovers who know about it.

Two months ago, a large group of the heads of various animal welfare organizations in Guilford County spoke passionately, one after another, about the problem to the Guilford County Board of Commissioners.  However, nothing seemed to change.

At the November 14 Animal Services board meeting, Animal Services Director Jorge Ortega and others said that the county is now in the planning stage of addressing the problem. County staff is drawing up a plan that will ultimately need to be approved by the Board of Commissioners. It could mean that Animal Services ends up working more closely with the county’s Division of Social Services, which might begin distributing donated items based on needs.

But for now, the situation continues and it is doing real damage to the severely understaffed shelter that has been facing many other major struggles.  From Ortega on down to the volunteers, everyone is working as hard as they can to help the animals, and they need to be doing other things besides recording the receipt of a pair of used socks and then storing them until they hear back from county management.

Hopefully, the county will fix the problem; however; for now, the damage continues in a multitude of ways.

  • Wasted staff time: Animal Services staff are now spending hours every week inventorying donations – including broken items and trash – which, as of Spring of 2024, must be kept track of and held in shelter space until approval of the relevant inventory list is received.
  • Space overload: Donations are piling up at the shelter, filling employee breakrooms and offices since they can’t be used or disposed of until approved.

The need to throw away valuable donations: Donations that could be given to the public – such as unopened pet food, litter boxes, dog leashes and puppy pads – are being discarded because the shelter lacks the space to store the items, and shelter workers are no longer allowed to redistribute them to pet lovers in need.

A loss of community support: Guilford County Animal Services has been forced to cancel large, regular donations from Chewy and HSUS, which are sometimes worth over $60,000 per quarter. The shelter is fortunate to have an Animal Services director like Ortega who’s worked hard in the past to establish relationships with these major entities to bring large-scale donations to needy people in Guilford County.  But now the county has lost this benefit because of the new rules that popped up earlier this year.

These major donations have, in recent years under Ortega’s leadership, helped the shelter advance the much-needed and long-needed process of building community goodwill and keeping pets out of the shelter. Some pet owners are surrendered by owners because they can no longer afford cat or dog food.

Program suspensions: As a result of having to cancel the large-scale donations from Chewy and HSUS, the shelter hasn’t been able to hold a Mobile Pet Assistance Clinic event since April of 2024. These events were key in providing resources for financially struggling pet owners – which is a big part of building community trust, and a critical strategy for lowering intake to the shelter by keeping pets with their owners.

All these problems are coming from the changes earlier this year in the county’s regulations that cover handling in-kind donations, but there appears to be no formal written ordinance mandating that in-kind donations to Guilford County must be inventoried and restricted from the public in this way.

Animal lovers argue that, without a change, hundreds of thousands of dollars in in-kind donations each year from individuals, nonprofits and corporations specifically intended to help pets in Guilford County won’t be coming to the county.

It could also affect euthanasia rates, which are likely to rise because the shelter has lost valuable tools for community outreach and support.

And already overworked shelter staff waste their valuable time counting towels, bags of litter, and old electronics – and then they end up stepping around these items in their breakroom and other rooms – rather than using that time to serve the public and take care of animals.

At a Thursday, Nov. 14 meeting of the Animal Services Advisory Board, board members were informed that county administrators are finally working on the problem and they hope to have a plan for addressing it in the near future.

About