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Pets wear committee out

Havre City Council members are sick of talking about animals.

At Wednesday night's meeting, the Ordinance Committee laid to rest, for now, the everlasting discussion of Havre's animal laws.

Having discussed the issue for nearly a year now, over the course of at least 11 meetings, the committee's Chair Andrew Brekke felt it was getting out of hand.

"To the outside observer it looks like we don't know what we're doing, and they'd be right," Brekke said. "The problem is we've let 100,000 cooks in the kitchen."

What began with a complaint about cats around town last May, turned into five months of discussion that led to the passing a revised law being passed by City Council last October.

Then other voices, critical of various parts of the new ordinance, joined the conversation.

City Judge Margaret Hencz said that the new numbering system did not play well with the record-keeping computer system she used.

Animal Control Officer Gordon Inabnit wanted to see a few changes and authored a draft, now called the "red folder version," to differentiate it from the many other revisions being looked at.

There was objection to terms like "proper application" being used in reference to the process of getting tags, though there is no application.

"I don't think that would ever be litigated, " Brekke said.

Others had problems with whether physical constraints were totally necessary, or if a dog could be reliably voice-controlled, an addition from a discussion nearly six months ago.

The word "able-bodied" was said to be "archaic" and possibly offensive.

And Wednesday night the committee had enough.

"I'm so tired of revisiting something that we had staff input on, "Janet Trethewey said. "We could do this ad nauseam. Every copy has something wrong with it."

Brekke concluded that portion of the meeting and wanted to move on.

"We are the legislative body, and if we decide to table, to not move forward, that's our decision, " Brekke said.

 

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