What you need to know
In response to growing complaints from residents and concerns about police resources, the Independence City Council is exploring potential operational changes to how the city handles loose dogs.
The discussion was broached by long-time Councilmember Carol Franzen, who said she’d been fielding complaints from neighbors on Pembroke Drive about someone’s pet dog that kept getting out, although Franzen said it was “not a vicious dog.”
Franzen volunteers with Kenton County Animal Services and has encouraged residents to get involved with the shelter in previous meetings.
The issue, Franzen said, is that on evenings and weekends (i.e. outside of Animal Services’ usual operating hours), Animal Services will only come out if there are reports of a vicious dog on the loose. Otherwise, calls for errant canines are handled by the police, which Franzen thought was a poor use of their time.
“The police aren’t really equipped to handle that,” Franzen said. “They shouldn’t handle it. They’ve got other things to do, but unfortunately, they have to respond to it.”
Kenton County moved to standardize animal control ordinances across its many jurisdictions in 2020, and Independence, along with other cities, adopted a uniform leash law, violations of which are a misdemeanor. Franzen initially thought the city’s ordinance needed to be tweaked, but City Attorney Jack Gatlin wondered if it was necessary.
“I’m not sure the ordinance needs as much tweaking as operationally dealing with animal control,” Gatlin said.
Kenton County confirmed some of this state of affairs when contacted. Animal Services’ facilities actually do, in fact, have operating hours on the weekend from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., during which time staff are available to handle calls.
Animal Services previously employed an officer on Saturdays but switched to an on-call structure outside of the aforementioned hours several months ago, according to the county. They are currently training a new animal control officer, with the goal of having someone available to work consistently, at least one day on the weekends.
Kenton County Animal Services recorded 733 calls to Independence in 2024, 12 of which were due to a bite or attack. Four hundred and seventy-four of the calls resulted in an animal control officer going out to a specific location in the city. There were 6,444 total animal control-related calls throughout the entire county in 2024, according to the Kenton County Emergency Communications Center, the largest number of which, 2,391, came from Covington.
“For a while, we were transporting dogs to Kenton County Animal Shelter after hours and dropping them off at, like, an intake for animals,” Police Chief Brian Ferayorni said at the meeting. “Again, that will take an officer off the road for anywhere from half an hour or so to an hour, depending on where they’re at and what’s going on.”
Discussion carried on for a short time. One resident, Ben Bach, who serves on the HOA board for his neighborhood, spoke at the meeting and attested that it was often unclear what to do about dogs that had slipped their leashes. Franzen eventually said that it might be worthwhile to see if there were people in the community who would be willing to volunteer with Animal Services to see if they could provide transport for loose dogs during off hours, rather than shunting everything to the police.
No official action was taken at the meeting, but Mayor Chris Reinersman said that whatever might eventually happen, it was important that Franzen and the council “come up with something that’s going to be practically enforced.”
“If we can do something operationally, obviously, we won’t have to do anything with the ordinance, but I just want to point out there that it is becoming a problem,” Franzen said.