Sacramento’s Front Street Animal Shelter to waive reclaiming fees in time for Fourth of July

Front Street Animal Shelter is making reclaiming lost pets during the Fourth of July easier by waiving pet-reclamation fees.

The fees will be waived for an entire year, effective immediately. Previously, to reclaim a lost pet, owners would be charged a daily boarding fee for every day the pet spent at the downtown Sacramento shelter and a return-to-owner fee. If the pet was unlicensed, the owners would also be asked to pay a non-licensed pet fee. In 2020, only 44% of animals at Front Street were claimed.

The fees are meant to offset the costs of taking in so many pets.

Ryan Hinderman, communications and customer service manager for Front Street Animal Shelter, told The Sacramento Bee that the shelter takes in about 10,000 pets annually. Adoption fees, reclaiming fees and public funding are the shelter’s main sources of income.

Friends of Front Street, a nonprofit group that supports the shelter, will be helping fund animal care in absence of the revenue. Hinderman noted that the fees will be waived for a year to verify the policy’s effectiveness before making a decision about potentially eliminating reclaiming fees for good.

“One of our concerns is that (the fees) may be getting in the way of some people reclaiming their pets as they are experiencing financial hardship,” Hinderman told The Bee. “Our hope is that by getting more animals out of the shelter more animals back to their families where they belong, that that will reduce crowding in the shelter.”

As Fourth of July approaches, the shelter anticipates a high number of lost pets.

Hinderman noted that families can check shelters websites — Front Street run by the city of Sacramento, the SPCA facility on Florin Perkins Road and Sacramento County’s Bradshaw site — for updates on animals in their care. He also added that families can post on Facebook lost and found pages, Nextdoor, Craigslist and other social medias in the case of a lost pet to make others aware of the animal. He emphasized the importance of animals being microchipped for identification.