UKIAH, CA., 6/3/26 — Mendocino County’s supervisors cut the county budget Tuesday, and by the end of the day, everyone knew where the money went. On paper the proposed budget is balanced — but only because the county is spending $2.6 million in leftover money from past years to cover recurring bills.
Chief Executive Officer Darcie Antle’s own budget message says the county “has operated under a structural deficit for many years,” and a state audit in December called its finances “strained” and “gradually declining,” with deficits three years running and reserves below the level governments are advised to hold. A county papering over the gap with one-time cash walks every department into anxiety.
So you would expect the animal shelter to be sweating. It isn’t.
“We weren’t asked to cut,” said Amy Campbell, who runs Mendocino County Animal Care Services. “The budget is very similar to last year. I didn’t have any grand asks.”
The documents back her up. The CEO’s proposed budget recommends $1,225,106 for the shelter — within $5,000 of the $1,230,105 the department itself requested.
The only money Animal Care wants from that one-time fund is $25,000 to repair an incinerator. Out of that same $2.6 million, the county jail’s request runs to $365,000 for projects and $153,000 for IT. Many people worry when they hear “animal shelter” and “budget” in the same sentence.
“We are not euthanizing animals for space,” Campbell said. “I’m very grateful for that. I know a lot of counties do that.”
The county’s own records bear that out too. Between Jan. 1 and May 29, Animal Care took in 294 animals and logged 276 outcomes: 115 adopted, 34 returned to their owners and 52 transferred to rescues or the humane societies. Forty-four were euthanized. The county puts its live-release rate at 72.4%, and none of it, Campbell says, was for lack of space.
A department that runs lean on purpose
The shelter is holding steady because it has spent the last few years running tight by choice. Last fiscal year, Campbell said, Animal Care left “a few vacancies” unfilled to absorb budget pressure rather than ask the county for more funds. As of late April, the department was budgeted for 14 jobs and had 10.5 filled — roughly three and a half positions sitting empty, among them two animal facility attendant slots.
The building has 46 dog kennels and a separate area to quarantine puppies that might be carrying parvo, and it has been running close to full for a long time. Right now 23 dogs and 22 cats are in foster homes — a cat number Campbell expects to climb past 100 once kitten season is in full swing.
Full means full. The shelter has largely stopped taking owner surrenders. The records show why it can hold the line there: of the 294 animals taken in this year, 220 came in as strays — animals that arrive whether there’s room or not. Just 15 were owner surrenders, the one kind of intake the shelter can still turn away.
“We don’t have the capacity,” Campbell said. “The shelter should be the last resort for owned animals.” Instead the staff hands people what they can — a pet-food pantry, low-cost spay and neuter, courtesy posts to help rehome an animal, referrals to rescues.
What they can’t offer is veterinary care. “There’s really no help for vet care,” Campbell said. For a family in Willits or Covelo that just lost a job or a lease, that is the gap that ends with a leash handed across the counter.
Money in the building, sitting still
There’s a big pile of money inside Animal Care that isn’t being spent. That’s on purpose.
In November the board accepted a $408,000 bequest from the Margery S. Pfund Living Trust, restricted to spay and neuter work. It is the largest single gift the shelter has seen in years. Six months on, almost none of it has gone out the door, and Campbell is in no hurry.
“I want every penny to go towards spay and neutering,” she said. “We’re really not in a huge hurry to spend that. It’s sitting there, it’s available. As opportunities arise, we’ll look at using that money.”
It’s not a department bailing itself out with a stranger’s money. It’s a department sitting on restricted money it can’t spend yet — in part because the veterinarians who perform spay and neuter surgery are scarce countywide. “We have money available,” Campbell said. “We just can’t find the people.”
A safety net that runs on no county money
What holds up the rest of the system are the county’s two humane societies, and they do it without county funds.
The Humane Society for Inland Mendocino County, in Redwood Valley, took in 805 animals last year and got 784 of them out alive, said its shelter director, Jenny Hanzlik. In 2025 it pulled 54 dogs and puppies from the county shelter — adoptable animals moved over “to help create space and increase adoption opportunities.”
For that, the county pays nothing. “HSIMC does not receive funding from Mendocino County for animal transfers or shelter operations,” Hanzlik said. There is no contract, and none being negotiated. The county confirms it: asked in a records request for any agreements with the two humane societies, Animal Care Services said it holds no contracts or funding agreements with either one.
Campbell describes the arrangement warmly. “We have a really great working relationship,” she said; both the inland and coast humane societies regularly pull dogs from her shelter. But she was plain that the net is thinner than it was. Before the pandemic the county could move animals out to rescues across the region, Marin Humane among them. “After COVID, everybody is so overwhelmed that the transfers are not happening like they used to,” she said. Everyone is full.
When the safety valve fails
Moving animals out is how a full shelter that won’t kill for space keeps running. Most go to the two humane societies or to rescues Ukiah knows and trusts. Some have gone farther.
For years, the county sent dogs to Miranda’s Rescue, a Fortuna nonprofit in Humboldt County now at the center of a criminal investigation for claiming to be a no-kill shelter while allegedly euthanizing many dogs sent to them..
Campbell didn’t dodge the connection, but she put it in proportion. “Our numbers are not anywhere near the numbers of other shelters of what was sent up there,” she said.
And she isn’t getting out ahead of the facts: “I’m just kind of waiting to see how the investigation goes. There’s a lot of things out there that may or may not be true.”
She has watched the pattern before — the rescue that means well and goes under. “Their intention is very good,” she said of the operators who end up overwhelmed. “It’s very easy, I think, to have it become an overwhelming problem that you’ve found yourself in, because you’re trying to help.” It is the same pressure that fills her own kennels — more animals coming in than there are homes and rescues to take them.
The reprieve may not last. This year’s budget balances only because the county is spending $2.6 million it banked in better years — one-time money that doesn’t come back. When that cushion is gone, the county faces real cuts, and a small general-fund department like Animal Care, already running with vacancies, has little left to give.
None of this means the shelter is comfortable. It means it has kept its own house in order while the county around it has not. But the question going forward is whether a department asking for almost nothing gets to keep what little it has while the county scrambles to close a gap it has admitted to for years.
Campbell is bracing for kitten season and focusing on the animals.
“We’re getting by,” she said.
The county “leadership” (BoS and executives) can give up some of their inflated salaries to help ACS out.
You could be right about salaries, however, those workers are also impacted by the condition all Americans are facing, that costs are going up and life is becoming more and more unaffordable. All part of the remarkable job the current administration has done on the American people. Maybe that sounds unfair, but the war in Iran is raising oil prices, which raises everything else. Add to that cutting benefits and you begin to see the situation.
Sarah, I believe you misunderstand my post. I recognize that the little folks who work for the County are getting shafted, while the BoS & executives continue their handsome salaries and perks. Hence, my comment that they can sacrifice some and give it to ACS. Will that happen? A snowball’s chance, of course.
As for the economic emergency generated by “Israel’s” war on Iran (and Lebanon), yeah, just another gas can dumped onto the flames of this ongoing catastrophe which began in January 2020. The inflation we’re all experiencing stems from, acutely, Trump’s and Biden’s “stimulus checks” as well as the hundreds of billions blown on “pandemic mitigation.” And, instead of years of healing after the pandemic, we went right into war on Russia and now Iran.
I’m convinced our rulers (not the same people who claim to be the government) intend to collapse the economy. Desperate people will do desperate things, including agree to radical life changes that people secure in their livelihoods and housing would never accept. The worst of inflation is yet to come, and likely will start to be seen by early July here in America, as petroleum supplies dwindle to levels unprecedented.