City-funded animal shelters are administering medicine that’s more than a decade old to suffering strays, according to a scathing new report unveiled Sunday.
In announcing the findings, city Comptroller Scott Stringer blasted the Health Department, which oversees the shelters, for letting them store the expired animal medicine next to employees’ lunches.
Stringer also cited overcrowding, “financial-control weaknesses” and unaccounted-for pet medicine at the shelters.
“The storage practices would make your stomach crawl,” Stringer said at an Upper West Side press conference.
“In Brooklyn, we found vaccines and employee lunches in the same fridge. In Manhattan, we found vaccines and animal remains stored in the same fridge . . . Incredibly, we found 499 occasions of expired drugs being given to animals.”
The nonprofit Animal Care & Control of NYC spends $13.3 million a year — mostly city funds — to operate its centers. It has a five-year, $51.9 million contract with the Health Department to run shelters in Manhattan, Staten Island and Brooklyn, as well as drop-off centers in The Bronx and Queens.
AC&C, which takes in about 30,000 stray and lost animals annually, cooperated fully with the comptroller’s audit, according to its spokeswoman, Alexandra Silver.
“AC&C has already undertaken steps to implement several of the recommendations in the comptroller’s report, and will continue to strengthen our policies and procedures,” she said.
Stringer saved some of his harshest criticism for the Department of Health, whose commissioner is appointed by Mayor de Blasio.
“We certainly need more oversight that, quite frankly, the Department of Health has been unable to provide,” Stringer said. “To have expired vaccines sitting in refrigerators that open and close next to employee lunches and the remains of dead animals — I mean, I haven’t seen anything like it.”
Other problems at the shelters include:
- A ventilation system that connects healthy animals with sick ones at a Brooklyn facility, increasing risks of illness spreading.
- A “natural gas odor” in a main corridor of the Brooklyn facility.
- Overcrowding so severe at the Manhattan shelter that animal cages line the hallways.
- Improper safeguards on controlled substances that have “a street resale value,” making it easy for “misuse, loss or theft.”
“That’s crazy about the vaccines,” said one pet enthusiast who brought his pooch to the press conference. “I wouldn’t trust them for shots.”
Stringer is recommending that more than one AC&C employee handle the receiving and recording of controlled substances and that a computerized inventory system be implemented to track them.