Animal welfare official on leave pending investigation

Associate director suspected of ‘inappropriate transport of animals’

Mayor Tim Keller said Thursday that the city is investigating a top official in Albuquerque’s Animal Welfare Department.

Associate Director Deb Brinkley is on administrative leave pending the investigation.

“As folks have heard, we currently have some senior officials, or at least one, under investigation who is now on administrative leave because of inappropriate transport of animals,” Keller told a news conference at the city’s Eastside Animal Shelter. “We’ll see where this investigation goes in terms of the legality, but we know conceptually it was wrong, and we know it was inappropriate, and that practice has been stopped, and that individual will be held accountable.”

Keller said it’s unclear whether any criminal activity occurred.

Brinkley owns a dog rescue in Colorado, and Keller said city animals were being taken there.

“To our knowledge, it was a mix of animals that were difficult to adopt and some that seemingly were very adoptable, and you can see, in terms of financial incen-

tives, why that would be the case,” Keller said. “Either way, the way that this was done was totally inappropriate. You can’t have city management selling animals to their own company.”

Brinkley was a colleague of former director Paul Caster, who was replaced by Keller in December, before she was hired by the city.

“The individuals who used to be leading the department are no longer leading the department,” Keller said. “That is a big step in terms of changing direction.”

The mayor also said the department is working to standardize its collection of euthanasia data within its shelters.

The department remains committed to maintaining a “no-kill” policy, which in reality equates to a 10 percent or less euthanasia rate, but Keller said those numbers have been calculated in inconsistent ways in the past.

“When you have a situation where there’s lots of pressure for a no-kill policy and that can lead to folks massaging the numbers, it can lead to folks trying to send these animals elsewhere, perhaps inappropriately, and it can also lead to animals sitting here too long,” he said.

Animal Welfare Department interim Director John Soladay said the department is working to improve communication between the 140-person staff and 400-person volunteer force.

He said decisions to euthanize animals sometimes weren’t properly communicated to volunteers who may have been working with them, something he hopes to ameliorate.

“There’s always going to be an animal that folks are just not going to want to let go,” said Vickie Fisher, president of the nonprofit Kennel Kompadres, which supports the department, at Thursday’s conference. “It’s always going to be there, but it’s how you manage it, how you communicate it, how you document what you’ve done, how you decide at some point, it’s just going to have to end.”