Anchorage animal control officers will have an easier time ticketing owners of loose pets or barking dogs if the Assembly passes an ordinance backed by Mayor Ethan Berkowitz.
The ordinance would insert this sentence into Title 17, the municipal law governing animals: "Unless otherwise provided, a person who violates a provision of Title 17 is strictly liable for the offense, regardless of that person's intent or mental state."
This means that if a dog gets loose, an officer with Anchorage Animal Care and Control would no longer have to prove it was because of the pet owner's careless actions. Instead, the officer could simply give the pet owner a citation for not restraining the dog.
The change was prompted, in part, by a pair of court cases involving loose dogs, but would also apply to the rest of Title 17, which includes rules for animal care, noise and licensing, among other areas.
The citations would be just like a traffic violation, Municipal Attorney Bill Falsey said in an interview Tuesday.
"If you're speeding, you're speeding and you get a citation," Falsey said. "The traffic enforcement official does not need to show that the reason you were speeding was because you were distracted."
The ordinance was scheduled for introduction at Tuesday's Assembly meeting, but at the request of Assemblyman Tim Steele, it was pushed back. Steele said he had outstanding questions for Animal Care and Control staff and worries about the proposed change.
"It seems fairly one-sided. It gives more power to enforcement officers," said Steele, who faced a $75 fine this summer when his unleashed German shepherd killed a small dog in Spenard.
Steele said he specifically took issue with the proposed deletion of a single word from municipal law. The law currently requires that "secure enclosures" should "reasonably prevent" a list of things, including animals' escape. The proposed ordinance would remove the word "reasonably," which Steele said left him concerned.
Falsey said that in the past, animal control officers have enforced Title 17 without proving negligence. That's how the law was supposed to be interpreted, he said. But recent court cases have found that the law wasn't specific enough and required officers to establish that the pet owner acted with negligence.
In one case, a woman reported finding two dogs loose in her neighborhood and identified them as belonging to her neighbor, according to the order issued by the Anchorage Superior Court in December 2014. The neighbor told the animal control officer that his dogs were inside his home when they pushed open a door to the garage and ran out the open garage door.
He received citations and fines, which he appealed to an administrative hearing officer and then to Superior Court, arguing that the municipality had not proved that he acted with negligence. The judge remanded the case back to Anchorage animal control and said the officer had to prove that the man's conduct was a result of negligence, the order said.
In a January 2016 decision, a Superior Court judge made a similar ruling. A woman's dog was loose when it bit a neighbor twice, once on each calf. An animal control officer gave the woman a notice of violation for failing to control and confine her dog. The woman appealed the decision to the Superior Court, and the judge found that the municipality did not establish negligence and remanded the case back to animal control.
"What these two Superior Court judges were saying was that you had to show that the dogs were unrestrained because of some negligence on the part of the owner -- that they either knew or should have known that the dogs were unrestrained or likely to become unrestrained, which really puts animal control into a different mode," Falsey said. "It becomes more of a CSI animal control, which is not what was intended and not the municipality's historic practice."
Assembly member Dick Traini said Tuesday he expected the ordinance to be introduced at the next scheduled Assembly meeting on April 26.