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The City Council passed an ordinance Tuesday night requiring pet owners to spay and neuter their animals or pay for the right not to. 

The vote was 6-2, with Vice Mayor Maudelle Shirek and Councilmember Diane Woolley voting in opposition, Councilmember Margaret Breland absent and the others supporting the ordinance. 

A last-ditch effort urging the council to forget the ordinance and focus its time and energy on improving the animal shelter, went down in defeat. The substitute motion, proposed by Woolley and Shirek, suggested that the council wait about five or six weeks to pass an ordinance until a shelter director was named, and enlist the help of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine’s Shelter Medicine Program to help improve the operation of the animal shelter. 

Woolley’s motion was defeated by a 4-3 vote, with Councilmember Polly Armstrong and Shirek joining Woolley in favor of the proposal and Councilmembers Dona Spring, Linda Maio, Betty Olds and Mayor Shirley Dean voting against it. Councilmember Kriss Worthington abstained and Breland was absent, having left the meeting early due to illness. 

The new ordinance, which Armstrong said has been misrepresented as mandatory, will require dog and cat owners to pay a $30 annual fee if they choose not to spay or neuter their animals. The fee cannot be raised for two years. Licenses for altered dogs will be $7.50. Altered cats will not require a license. 

Under the new ordinance, if a dog is caught running at large or is a dangerous animal, the citation will be $100. But this amount will be forgiven if the dog is altered within 30 days. If the dog is on the “bad dog” list, meaning it has been picked up before, the license will cost the owner $60 if the dog is unaltered. 

The new law also makes feeding and harboring feral cats a public nuisance unless the person doing so is working with an animal agency or working to have the cats spayed or neutered. 

Low-income residents and those over 65 years old are exempt from paying licensing fees. 

Proponents of the ordinance, which has been discussed in various forms for five years, said they are relieved that action has been taken on behalf of Berkeley’s animals. 

“I feel very good that council has taken a giant leap for animals here in Berkeley,” Spring said Wednesday. Spring served on the animal task force that hammered out the ordinance. 

“There was so much misinformation put forth – it was painful to see the tactics put forth to beat this mild-mannered ordinance,” Spring said. 

She called the ordinance “mild-mannered” in comparison to cities such as Los Angeles, which requires its pet owners to pay a $100 licensing fee for unaltered animals, and an additional $100 breeders charge if owners wish to breed the animal. 

Spring noted that in San Mateo a spay and neuter program reduced the number of animals killed by over 35 percent and, in contrast, Oakland built a new animal shelter without a spay and neuter program and it was full the day after its completion. 

Lee Ann Assalone, a former animal shelter worker in Santa Cruz, supported the ordinance and pleaded with the council to increase education in conjunction with it. Assalone said she had the unfortunate responsibility of euthanizing unwanted animals. 

“Everyone knows the right thing to do,” she said. 

The staff estimates that the cost to put the ordinance in place will be $57,000 for the first year and $20,000 for subsequent years. The $37,000 start-up cost includes $25,000 for a staff person to set up the unaltered license program and $12,000 for computer upgrades. The money will be taken from a surplus of $52,500 allocated to the council’s animal task force in last year’s budget. The funds were not spent because of the time taken to implement the ordinance. 

Opponents of the law, and even some supporters, believe that it is too bureaucratic, complaint-driven and punitive. 

“I think we have taken a good idea and created a bureaucracy that I don’t think will work,” said Armstrong. “It seems we could have done it in a much easier way.” 

Woolley said the ordinance has caused bad feelings among animal activists. 

“This has caused a split in the community when we should be working together for the animals. It’s become counter-productive,” she said. 

“The fix-or-be-fined notion becomes punitive. The idea that you can legislate compliance is nuts.”