Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter workers confront management over pay, working conditions

About 30 Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter workers and volunteers and community members gathered Thursday at the Rodriguez Street shelter off of Soquel Avenue, where they held an unannounced rally for better working conditions and demanded responses to longstanding complaints about low pay and staffing shortages.

After the group waved picket signs and chanted along Seventh Avenue, they yelled for management to come out of their offices. Shortly after, a few of the workers met with shelter director Amber Rowland, County Administrative Services Officer Joe Phares and County Personnel Director Ajita Patel in an attempt to find a clearer path forward in their ongoing dispute with the shelter’s management.

The workers, represented by the Service Employees International Union Local 521, filed an unfair labor practices charge with the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) last week. That charge alleges the shelter has faced continuous understaffing, disputes between management and workers on speaking to the media, volunteers taking on animal care worker duties and more. The PERB can direct the employer or union to make a resolution based on the charges. The union expects to hear back within weeks.

The workers have also created a petition demanding the shelter’s joint powers authority (JPA) board, county and shelter management provide what they say are necessary resources to preserve animal welfare and to properly run and fund the county shelters, hire enough workers to control the overpopulated shelter, and align worker pay with the rest of the county workforce.

The JPA is an entity that allows two or more public agencies to jointly exercise common powers. The shelter’s JPA is made up of Santa Cruz County and its four cities. The JPA pay structure has five steps that employees can work their way up over time, with a 5% pay increase at each step. The Santa Cruz County employee structure has seven steps, which means they can reach higher hourly rates than those under the JPA structure.

Rowland told Lookout that although there was a planned meeting between management and union stewards, the scope of the workers’ confrontation Thursday was unexpected, and that she is reviewing the petition and their demands. She expects to discuss the demands with JPA personnel in the near future. She said that she supports shelter workers and always has. Phares was not immediately available for comment.

“The jobs that they do are physically and emotionally challenging and too often underrecognized,” Rowland said. “I support the workers and hope we can move beyond divisiveness, because the staff does a phenomenal job with the challenging work.”

However, workers say they remain frustrated.

Animal Services Coordinators Karen Coullahan and Jillian Ganley said that nearly seven months of inaction has only exacerbated the concerns raised in June. Dogs and cats reproduce the most in the summer, leading to a larger population in the shelter and significant stress on workers.

“We are trying to survive the daily operations one at a time,” said Coullahan. “We talk about meeting outside of the normal day to see how we can make things better but we just don’t have the time to do that.”

Certain programs like Planned Pethood — which offers low-cost and free services like spaying, neutering, vaccines and microchipping — have been suspended for several years due to both COVID and staff shortages, which has also caused the shelter population to increase. Ganley said that workers have pushed for the shelter to restart these types of programs, but to no avail.

“We’re asking for this to be focused on how we can restart these programs to help the community,” she said. “We’re just hitting the point where we’re coming to the conclusion that maybe new management is what we need.”

Workers and community members plan to attend a JPA board meeting Dec. 11 to voice their concerns with shelter operations, but said they hope that Thursday’s demonstration will get the ball rolling on changes they are demanding.

“It’s not just a small group of people who feel this way, it’s the shelter body as a whole,” said Coullahan. “It affects everyone from the top departments to the lowest departments.”

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FOR THE RECORD: This story was updated to remove wording from the petition that named specific shelter administrators as well as allegations against them. That language was later removed; SEIU 521 did not respond to Lookout’s attempts to clarify the circumstances of the removal.

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