Council member: Pet licensing should move forward

CEDAR RAPIDS - City Council member Don Karr was attending a family funeral in central Iowa, so he missed the Tuesday evening council meeting.

But he said the city's proposed pet licensing ordinance, which appeared to die on a procedural 4-4 vote of the City Council this week, will not rest in peace as far as he's concerned.

Karr said he will push to get the proposed pet licensing ordinance back on the agenda for the council's next meeting on Oct. 26, and he thinks a majority of council members will support it.

The council had backed the ordinance, which requires three separate council votes, on a 5-3 vote on Sept. 28.

However, the city subsequently made some minor changes to the ordinance, necessitating a new public hearing and a new, first vote on the revised ordinance.

Mayor Ron Corbett took the routine matter of setting a new public hearing for the ordinance off the council's consent agenda on Tuesday, and asked if the council wanted to have another public hearing or not.

Only four council members of eight in attendance voted to conduct it, and the pet-license matter died for a lack of majority.

Karr said Friday that Corbett knew he was going to be out of town and unavailable on Tuesday. He suggested that the mayor, who opposes pet licenses, took an opportunity to get the matter set aside.

“That's ridiculous,” Karr said. “The issue just can't go away because of a tie vote.”

Karr said requiring pet owners to pay an annual license fee is a reasonable request to help pay for the city's animal care and control operation. He noted that some people pay a couple hundred dollars or more for a dog and spend as much or more on food a year. Surely, they can pay a $10 annual fee to license the pet, he said.

It's still not entirely clear if a council majority exists to back pet licensing.

Council members Kris Gulick and Chuck Wieneke have said the revenue from the license fee is not unlike a whole host of fees that the city charges so it does not have to support every service with property taxes.

Council member Pat Shey said this week that he also supports pet licenses and council member Tom Podzimek said he, too, is apt to vote in favor of pet licenses. He thought the city ought to consider providing licenses for altered cats and dogs for free and charge $50 a year for unaltered pets.

The city is proposing to charge $10 a year for altered dogs and cats and $35 a year for unaltered ones.

Corbett on Friday said Karr hadn't talked to him about revisiting the issue of pet licenses.