Responding to an a follow-up request from The Chronicle on Thursday, the county’s finance office provided the latest status of repayments. Two current commissioners (Barbara Bergman and Conan Smith) and two former commissioners (Jessica Ping and Ken Schwartz) have not yet paid the amounts that the audit report determined they owe:
UNPAID
Barbara Bergman 1,875.33
Jessica Ping 5,002.68
Ken Schwartz 1,054.60
Conan Smith 591.39

[link]

The comparable figure for Washtenaw County is $1,616,146 (projected 2012) to handle 6000 animals (also projected 2012) per the provided document at [link], is a cost to the county of about $270 per animal.

Now these are not completely apples to apples comparisons because I wasn’t able to tease out the capital costs of the facility, but it suggests strongly that the costs that the county is currently paying are reasonable, and that there’s no particular savings from having a near worst in the state save rate vs a near best in the state save rate. Consider that the Washtenaw shelter adopted out about 7 times as many animals as the Kent shelter for about the same cost per animal in 2010.

I’m looking at this report: [link] which computes a “save rate” for animals in shelters. HSHV has an 80%+ save rate, euthanizing 1,111 animals in 2010. The most different outcome for a shelter of comparable size is the Kent County Animal Shelter, with about an 18% save rate, euthanizing 4,722 animals with a comparable intake number (Kent takes in about 900 more animals annually).

I wasn’t able to pull out from the Kent County budget summary how much it costs them to run their shelter, but if you can imagine a different way to run a system at some kind of lower cost, you’d have to use them as one comparable setup.