Breeding issue tabled …again

It is a can that has been kicked down the road for almost three years - or more like 14 years, depending on how you count. And it got kicked down the road again last week as the city council failed to come to a consensus on the issue of pet breeding in Boulder City.

Back in the summer of 2023, a BC resident came to the city trying to get a permit to breed dogs. State law, passed in 2011, says cities have to regulate breeding and city law says there is an exception to the spay and neuter law if the owner of the animal has a valid breeding permit. The problem is that there is no mechanism in city law to actually get such a permit.

“Boulder City Municipal Code generally requires all animals to be spayed or neutered,” City Attorney Brittany Walker told the council. “However, there has been a loophole in our code that says there is an exception if the person holds a valid breeders permit. This has operated as a barrier to enforcement of our current spay and neuter law if an individual says they wish to breed their animal because our code does allow an exception for breeding yet does not have any parameters on the regulation of breeding.”

Walker continued, saying that city staff believed that state law preempted a city’s ability to prohibit breeding altogether. Late last year, staff went so far as to request an official opinion from the Nevada attorney general on the issue. After eight long months, the opinion confirmed that the city could not totally prohibit commercial breeding. Hobby breeding (i.e., not for money) could be outlawed and a city could place extremely stringent requirements on potential breeders. The city could make the fee for a permit $100,000. It just can’t outlaw the practice.

And there is where it all fell apart last week. On one side of the argument was Councilman Steve Walton and Mayor Joe Hardy who pressed for the city to, finally after the issue has come before the council three different times, pass an ordinance outlining some kind of fee and penalty structure which they could, potentially, tighten up later. On the other side were councilwomen Sherri Jorgensen, Cokie Booth and Denise Ashurst who all wanted to see the ordinance be much tighter before they would vote to approve it.

In the end, a motion by Walton to pass the ordinance drafted by city staff could not even get a second and it died without a vote. (As mayor, Hardy runs the meeting and is not able to make or second any motion.)

Under the proposal, the fee for a permit would be $250 and and additional $80 for a business license. Fines for breeding without a permit were slated to be at $500 for the first violation, $750 for the second violation, and $1,000 for the third and subsequent violations. There were substantial additional requirements ranging from the amount of space dedicated to each breeding animal to how often an animal could be bred. Walker called it the most stringent law, had it passed, in Southern Nevada.

When Walker said she was available for questions, Booth jumped in immediately. “I’m absolutely opposed to breeding. I wish we didn’t have to have it. I think the breeding ordinance should be very, very tough and hard to find a place to go to,” she said while advocating for the practice to be limited to one specific area of town.

Jorgensen piggybacked on that with a question about whether the law would limit how many breeders could be in a single neighborhood.

“There’s no limit with how many breeders can be in a city block. Like three houses in a row could have breeding licenses?” she asked. Walker confirmed that would be possible.

Ashurst asked if there was any zoning limit or if breeders could operate anywhere in the city.

“Everywhere,” Walker answered, pointing out that in the last round of this discussion when staff was directed to draft an ordinance, they had not been told to limit it to any one area.

Ashurst, who was not on the council the last time this issue came up, also said she thought the fees should be higher. Walker pointed out that raising the fees above $500 would require the city to do another business impact study.

Walton advocated for getting a law passed. “Whatever breeding has been going on, illegal as it may be, it’s been going on. I don’t think passing this is going to create a mecca of licensed legal breeding in Boulder City. We’re not going to become the the destination for dog breeding,” he said.

“We’ve talked about it three meetings now,” he continued. “We’ve presented bills and we’re just going to go round and round and we still don’t have a a breeding regulation. You could push me over with a feather if we had two people in the next 12 months that applied to be a legal breeder and went through the entire process.”

After the motion on the breeding ordinance failed, Hardy accepted a motion from Walton to approve the resolution after removing the language about breeding permits and fines but keeping the civil fines for having a dog unleashed in the Eldorado Valley, the desert conservation area, in Hemenway Park and on a municipal golf course. That motion passed unanimously.