Last November, an animal charity gained support from the Provo City Council to implement a three-year trap/neuter/return, or TNR, pilot program to tackle the city's stray cat population.
But in the months since, the charity claims Provo officials were unwilling to cooperate, and the deal fell apart.
Best Friends Animal Society, based in Kanab, announced Jan. 30 that it was rescinding an offer of up to $1 million to start the TNR program.
The charity's chief mission officer, Holly Sizemore, said the group was "very hopeful" after the City Council passed a memorandum of understanding with Best Friends in a 5-2 vote Nov. 19, despite the Provo Police Department's objections.
However, Sizemore said city officials were unwilling to work any further with the group and claimed a meeting with Provo Chief of Police Troy Beebe and Mayor Michelle Kaufusi was abruptly canceled at the last minute and was not rescheduled.
"I really do believe that (the city) was using delay tactics to kill the deal, because I made it very clear on numerous communications with the mayor's office, the sheriff's department and the City Council that we were under an urgent timeline," Sizemore said.
Provo City released a statement expressing the city's skepticism of TNR but did not respond to further request for comment.
"TNR programs have strong advocates who believe such programs are in the best interests of the animals," the release said. "However, some national studies have found these programs to be ineffective. Even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has published an official stance that TNR programs do not improve the quality of life for feral cats. ... Concerns have been raised about the continued impact for residents who live near feral cat populations, as well as the impact on public health and local wildlife, including the potential spread of diseases such as avian flu. Additionally, there is a tax-payer cost consideration for continuation of such a program.
"While we were still in the process of evaluating these factors, Best Friends informed us they were withdrawing their funding offer for the program. While our findings thus far had indicated a TNR program was not right for Provo, we sincerely appreciate Best Friends' willingness to collaborate and understand their decision to focus their resources elsewhere."
TNR is considered an alternative method to taking feral cats to adoption centers and euthanizing them if they're unfit for adoption.
Many animal rights organizations believe it's a more humane and efficient way to control cat populations, including the National Animal Control Association. Other organizations, like PETA, say it's ineffective and leads to greater suffering for the cats.
Sizemore argues TNR is more effective than removing the cats because people are more willing to volunteer their time to trap and neuter cats than to euthanize them.
The program is well-established across Utah, with programs in Salt Lake, Davis, Weber and Cache counties, and Sizemore said nearly all the major shelters in Utah either run their own TNR programs or support it.
However, the two Utah County animal shelters, North Utah Valley and South Utah Valley, are run by special service districts and do not have TNR programs. They are responsible for 96% of all cats killed in the state, Best Friends claims.
"This is largely due to the trapping, impounding, and killing of otherwise healthy outdoor cats and a longstanding refusal to adopt contemporary cat programs," a Best Friends release stated.
Sizemore said the adoption board members have long been opposed to TNR. But after years of effort, she got a partial commitment from the Northern Utah Valley board.
"At some point, they said, 'Look, we don't have the jurisdiction to approve this. You'd have to go city by city.' So I said, 'OK, that's a great idea,'" Sizemore said.
Neither animal shelter board responded to a request for comment.
Best Friends determined Provo a good fit to implement a pilot program and made contact with the city in February of last year, Sizemore said.
The City Council allowed a hearing for the proposal at the November work session.
In Best Friends' argument, the charity's director of national shelter outreach, Scott Giacoppo, detailed his successes running a TNR program as an animal control officer in Washington, D.C.
"About eight or nine months after implementing one of my animal patrol officers came to me and said, 'chief, I don't have any cat calls on my log anymore,'" Giacoppo said.
After the pitch, a member of the Provo Police Department spoke out against TNR, arguing feral cats are a public health hazard and invasive species, and that TNR returns nuisance cats the the citizens.
"In areas like ours, (TNR programs) don't work because these little predators are killing all of our wildlife," Capt. Brian Wolken said. "We have rivers and wild wetlands down here. We have the mountains and hillsides, and we're letting these cats roam free.
"TNR programs have consistently failed. You can see surveys on both sides and say, 'Yeah, they work, or they don't work,' but they facilitate the spread of diseases and maintain cats in an unsafe condition."
Wolken also stated that once the three-year program started there would be no going back because "the pressure that you would receive from the animal advocates, in the media and everything else."
The department suggested the city maintain the status quo to address that cat issue, which led to some pushback from the City Council.
"It just seems to me that we've got a status quo that has not been working and that is requiring our officers to spend an enormous amount of time dealing with a problem," Councilman George Handley told Wolken. "It seems to me that we've got reasonable grounds for believing that it's worth trying something different."
Despite the support of five of the seven City Council members, though, the proposal never got off the ground.
Sizemore believes the police department's opposition to the project led to its failure.
"Because the police run animal control, of course, we need their coordination and ideally their cooperation for this to be successful," Sizemore said, "even though we were prepared to take on the lion's share of actually running the program.
"It was up to the administration, and then that's where it died, because we were never able to gain access to the people we needed to to come up with a plan and a written agreement."