Showing posts with label Win For Local Residents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Win For Local Residents. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Gloucester Officials Fix Animal Control Laws After Complaints Filed

A win for the citizens of Gloucester County. 

 After numerous complaints we filed and other complaints sent to us about this mess, Gloucester County officials have put the Animal Control ordinance, 3-15 into it's proper compliance.

  We showed how Animal Control Ordinance 3-15 was out of compliance on the county's own website, with the title reading, "Failure to perform duties of ownership. penalty", but was supposed to read, Care of Companion Animals.  

Care of Companion Animals is what the Gloucester County Board of Supervisors voted on and approved back in February of this year.  3-15 was also out of compliance with state law up until that time and a favorite ordinance of Gloucester Animal Control abuses in our view.



This is what the Animal Control ordinance section of the Gloucester County website looked like up until today.  We turned that section of the site into a PDF.  At the moment that section of the site has been taken down and now if you go to view the Animal Control ordinances, you are taken to the Gloucester Municode site.  There, the animal control ordinances reflect state laws more accurately.

  
Virginia Animal Control ammendments 1 2013" target="_blank">Gloucester County Virginia Animal Control ammendments 1 2013 from Chuck Thompson


Above is what the Gloucester County Board of Supervisors had passed for the new Animal Control Ordinances back in February, 2013.  A serious blow to the folks over at Animal Control as 3-15 is the ordinance that they use the most or in our own opinion, abuse the most, because of the way the title was written.

  Failure to perform duties of ownership is an easy ordinance to abuse, but Care of companion animals is much harder to apply to animal owners.  We argued the ordinance last year as it was being highly abused by Animal Control officers then in our view and as we were able to show through numerous posts on here.

  The ordinance was out of sync with state laws and even though Twitching Ted, (I'm not an attorney) Wilmot, County Attorney, was well aware that the ordinance was out of sync, hence not valid, it did not stop him from prosecuting cases under the invalid ordinance in the local courts at the same time he was working on changing the ordinance to comply with state laws.  (And the local judges allowed him to on top of it all.)

  It's pretty amazing how the local Gloucester/Mathews Gazette Journal managed to miss all of this.  

 We received an email today informing us it has been corrected.  A win for the citizens of this county that own animals and all other animal lovers in Gloucester, Virginia.
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