The nonprofit that ran Petaluma’s animal control fielded an estimated 350 to 370 dog bite calls a year. When the Sonoma County Civil Grand Jury asked how it handled them, the answer that came back was that a lot of those incidents didn’t rise to the level of a report. On how many dogs got declared dangerous, and what conditions got imposed to keep them from biting somebody else, nothing came back at all.
That gap is why the grand jury went back for a second look and titled the result “Animal Services Revisited: A City Asleep at the Wheel.” On Monday night, the Petaluma City Council votes on a response telling the grand jury it got the city wrong on all eight counts.
The draft response landed on the July 20 agenda as Item 12 last week. It disagrees with every one of the report’s eight findings — wholly with three, in part with five — and refuses five of the eight recommendations the council was asked to answer. The staff report puts it plainly: “the City does not agree with any of the proposed findings of the Grand Jury in this report.”
The council has not voted on any of that yet. The meeting starts at 6 p.m. Monday at City Hall, 11 English St., and the staff report notes the council can rewrite the response before it goes out.
What the grand jury said
The report, released May 12, grew out of a citizen complaint and picked up where the 2024-25 grand jury left off. That earlier report savaged North Bay Animal Services, the nonprofit that ran Petaluma’s shelter and animal control, over unsanitary conditions and staffing.
This one aims at City Hall instead.
The jury found the city manager’s office let North Bay Animal Services skip required reports for years without ever invoking the contract’s default clause. It found nobody was watching whether dog licensing got enforced — and licensing is how the state makes sure dogs are vaccinated against rabies. It found no system for logging resident complaints. And it found no reliable paper trail on dog bites, which left victims unable to get the documentation they needed to take it any further.
Then it went after the structure. Finding F1 says the council “has largely delegated its governing authority over Animal Services to the City Manager,” letting staff act without a recorded council vote. The jury’s summary is blunt: “The voice of the ballot box has been largely silenced.”
What the city says back
The city’s answer is that the grand jury doesn’t understand how a city works.
“The finding is factually and legally incorrect,” the response says of F1. “The Grand Jury fundamentally misunderstands the council-manager form of government, the system of municipal governance employed by the majority of California cities.” The council sets policy and approves budgets, the argument runs; the city manager runs the shop. Requiring a council vote for every administrative act would be unworkable in a city whose manager oversees more than 400 employees. The charter itself was adopted by voters, so voter accountability is baked in.
On the finances, the city says the grand jury invented a duty that doesn’t exist: “The City Manager’s Office had no fiduciary duty to oversee or ensure the financial stability of North Bay Animal Services (NBAS), an independent nonprofit corporation governed by its own Board of Directors.”
On the dangerous-dog hearing rules, the tone sharpens. The grand jury, the response says, “has persisted in misconstruing and misapplying provisions of Title 9 despite the City Attorney’s efforts to explain how they must be understood to harmonize the Municipal Code provisions with due process principles.” The city also notes the jury cited the wrong subsection of Petaluma’s own municipal code.
And in a footnote attached to the recommendation that it rewrite its hearing officer rules, the city reminds the grand jury where it stands in the pecking order: “While the Civil Grand Jury performs an important oversight function, it is not an elected body, not accountable to the voters, and does not set the City Council’s legislative calendar or staff work plan.”
That footnote is answering a finding that says the council stopped voting on things.
It came in a packet from City Manager Peggy Flynn, Assistant City Manager Brian Cochran, City Attorney Eric Danly and Assistant City Attorney Dylan Brady — the offices whose authority the finding is about. The response is addressed to Presiding Judge Christopher Honigsberg and written for Mayor Kevin McDonnell to sign on behalf of the whole council. The signature line is blank. It stays blank until the council votes.
What Petaluma will actually do
The rejections aren’t total. The city says it will act on three recommendations: regular reporting to the council on animal services, a resident complaint tracking system, and continued work toward countywide animal services governance. The city’s written response qualifies two of those three as happening only “in part.” The standard response form has no box for a partial yes, so the form lists all three flat.
Most of that arrives through the new animal services contract, due back to the council later this year.
The five it won’t touch include the big one — R1, a resolution spelling out what the city manager can decide alone and what needs a council vote. The city calls that “not warranted.” It also declines to buy into DocuPet, the licensing platform Sonoma County, Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park and Healdsburg already use.
The contractor at the center of the fight is already gone. North Bay Animal Services’ Clearlake contract ended Feb. 8, and coverage of the starved and mistreated animals left behind there built the public outrage that the grand jury says drove what happened next: on March 2, the council directed staff to terminate Petaluma’s contract, effective March 31.
The report argues the timing made a mess. The city manager’s office was already drafting a request for proposals to replace North Bay Animal Services when its contract ran out in July. Instead, the grand jury writes, the rushed termination “threw Petaluma into crisis management mode,” negotiating from an emergency position rather than running a real bid. Cloverdale, Windsor and Sebastopol, which also used the Petaluma shelter, were left scrambling for alternatives.
That’s the argument the council has to weigh Monday. The grand jury’s complaint isn’t really that the nonprofit failed — the city fired it for cause over exactly that. It’s that Petaluma took years to say so out loud, and that the saying-so should have happened at a public meeting, in a recorded vote, by people whose names go on a ballot. The city’s answer is that the machinery worked the way the voters built it.
Monday, that answer gets its recorded vote. The response is due to the Sonoma County Superior Court within 90 days of the report’s publication, so the council has weeks to spare — it doesn’t have to sign this one as written.
The staff report says so itself. Under “Alternatives,” the city manager and the city attorney list exactly one: “The City Council may edit the report prior to finalizing.”
The July 20 agenda packet is posted at cityofpetaluma.primegov.com/public/portal. The grand jury report is at sonoma.courts.ca.gov.