Sunnyvale’s new partnership with Santa Clara County Animal Services has some major glitches.
The county doesn’t accept healthy stray cats. Its spay and neutering services are limited and it’s more than 40 miles away to the animal services facility in San Martin. Peter Hoang, senior management analyst with the city’s Department of Public Safety, presented the situation to the Sunnyvale City Council at an April 22 meeting, where councilmembers raised concerns about the 45-minute commute.
While Hoang said the department hasn’t heard any official complaints with the distance, Mayor Larry Klein said he had.
“(I’ve) heard complaints, with either the distance or … the question about county facilities,” Klein said at the meeting. “(It) has not been a lot at this point, but there have been multiple cases.”
The city council began scrambling for an animal service provider when Sunnyvale’s 18-year-long partnership with the Humane Society of Silicon Valley ended late January. A fire at the Humane Society in December cause more damage than expected, forcing Sunnyvale to find another location. The city secured an emergency partnership with the county-run San Martin facility in February.
City spokesperson Jennifer Garnett said the county agreement covers all other animal care needs, such as sheltering abandoned or lost domestic animals. The county’s emergency contract will run until the end of January 2026. The city is exploring other options for long-term contracts to meet the city’s animal care needs.
“The only major service impact is the inability to impound healthy stray cats,” Garnett told San José Spotlight.
Garnett said the city has two animal control officers, but Sunnyvale doesn’t keep track of how much time officers spend driving. The city couldn’t provide data on how many calls animal control gets about stray cats.
Santa Clara County has been hit hard by “kitten season,” as stray cat colonies grow in various neighborhoods. While other cities struggle to grapple with stray cats, Sunnyvale’s stray cat population has been dwindling, according to Bay Area Cats founder Vanessa Forney.
Bay Area Cats is a nonprofit that helps spay and neuter cats across Sunnyvale, including strays. Forney said the nonprofit has been able to spay and neuter “thousands” of Sunnyvale cats in its five years of operation. She said the number of calls for the trap-neuter-release program has dropped in recent years, due in part to the nonprofit’s strategy of targeting entire neighborhoods rather than each individual call.
Because the county can’t shelter healthy stray cats and the extra distance to the county’s spay and neuter clinic, Bay Area Cats wants the city’s animal control calls about healthy stray cats to be directed to them. They can then trap, neuter and release the stray cats. Otherwise, Forney said the city risks having an explosion in its stray cat population.
“You can’t just have an open intake shelter, you can’t just have (trap-neuter-release), you can’t just have animal control that can help with the healthy cats. You need a combination of all of that,” Forney told San José Spotlight. “It has to be a whole encompassing solution where everyone is working together.”
She said the city needs to consider having a local facility that offers spay and neuter services. The nonprofit has been running a survey about animal care services in Sunnyvale, and almost every respondent so far said they wouldn’t be willing to drive to San Martin for spay and neuter services.
The city council unanimously voted to suspend a policy requiring Sunnyvale’s animal control to impound all healthy stray cats, because there’s nowhere the cats can be placed. Councilmembers want more information about the city’s animal service needs.
“I don’t think this is feasible in the long term,” Klein said. “It is an issue in the community, as we’ve seen … Suspending the ordinance is the right thing to do but having a long-term solution and answering some of those questions, ‘how do we figure out a stray is a stray,’ is an important thing.”
Contact B. Sakura Cannestra at [email protected] or @SakuCannestra on X.
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