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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIndianapolis Animal Care Services took significant step toward becoming a standalone agency in 2025 when a City-County Council committee voted in favor of the move on Monday.
IACS, which runs the city animal shelter, has been overseen by the larger Department of Business and Neighborhood Services, or BNS, which also deals with city operations including issuing permits, licenses, and registrations, and conducting inspections, demolishing unsafe buildings and curtailing illegal dumping.
As part of the proposed 2025 budget, Mayor Joe Hogsett’s administration seeks to remove IACS from the BNS’s long list of responsibilities. Shelter leaders emphasized that the move would also equip the new agency with additional resources, such as a $1 million increase in funding under the proposed budget.
The Metropolitan and Economic Development Committee voted to send the measure to the full City-County Council, which will consider it Sept. 9.
BNS Director Abbey Brands told the committee that the decision follows a “year of assessments” for animal care services. A full-time embedded employee from the Best Friends Animal Society, a national not-for-profit, has been working at the shelter while additional experts in animal welfare have cycled in. They have assessed Indianapolis’ operations and made recommendations for how the shelter can improve.
Additionally, Brands said the department is working with animal welfare consultancy Outcomes Consulting to shape the vision for the proposed Animal Care Services Agency.
“We’ve done enough research to tell us this should be it’s own organization,” Brands said. “What this assessment is … is what happens for the next three to five years? How do we sustain progress?”
The proposed agency would elevate the leader of the shelter to a director position with two deputy directors. The increased funds would also pay salaries for a chief financial officer and an office manager.
The funds would also pay for a kennel cleaning contract through Allied Services. Brands said that many major shelters across the country rely on cleaning contracts. Cleaning takes time away from staff that could be used on direct care of animals, she said, and removing that responsibility can help attract and retain staff.
The department is currently working to build a new shelter, on which officials broke ground this year. Brands said the shelter is still expected to be complete in early 2026.
Brands said that the work of the city’s animal welfare team is often criticized by passionate members of the community. But, what gets overlooked, she said, are some of the victories. The shelter’s live release rate is currently 87%, and animals have been adopted from as far away as Maine.
“What that means is that if 10 dogs come into our shelter, eight to nine of them are making it out into positive life outcomes,” Brands said. “That’s a big deal. And it just gets completely shrouded in all the other yelling and everything else that goes on.”
If the proposal is approved, Animal Care Services would begin operating independently Jan. 1.
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How about the firing employees who are doing background checks on potential adopters to see if they don’t have any history of animal abuse? Seems to me that’s definitely the people you don’t want adopting animals from there is someone who already has a history of abuse of animals.