AG 1993 11 15 - Laserfiche WebLink

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ANIMAL CONTROL LICENSING SYSTEM Upon Board approval, Cabarrus County can implement the animal licensing system using existing personnel and equipment plus some extra computer terminals and temporary data entry personnel. This could be accomplished through the coordination of the Health Department to list information, MIS to compute and print it, and the Tax Collector to collect the money. The system would be mail-based as much as possible for listing, payment, and delivery of license tags. This smooths out the bottleneck of a tremendous amount of transactions for annual licensing of a population estimated to be between 70,000 and 100,000. It also makes it three times more time efficient than a point of sale process, which will be used for the remainder of licensing that occurs because of late listing, discovery, and new arrivals. The system would also be based on the mainframe computer for much the same reasons: data entry and printing would be of such volume and simultaneity that the size and speed of a larger system versus a PC would be beneficial. The proposed system also assumes that the Board would make two alterations to the Animal Control Ordinance. The first would be to have the license year run from July 1 until June 30, putting the animal license collection transactions at a different time than the regular tax collections and allowing us to collect money six months earlier. The second would be to drop the provision for the 50% license fee for animal owners qualifying for partial year's license. This would save us $2,000 in programming and data entry time. The weakness in the system is that it would have to be voluntary, relying on the owner to list the animals because we cannnot use the encrypted data from the veterinarians. Also, we only keep records on homeowners, so renters and mobile home owners would not be mailed a listing form. They would have to go to a government office to obtain this form. Accordingly, we anticipate the low compliance rates of 50% for homeowners and 20% for renters. The average amount of license fee has also been lowered to $7.10 because the classification of the animal's fertility will be voluntary versus data from veterinarian. Finally, rabies vaccination obtained voluntarily through the listing process is expected to virtually non-existent and worthless. Effective rabies control would have to be achieved over time by entering rabies vaccination information from the veterinarians into the animal data base. The system is expected to generate a profit of $38,589 annually, based on revenues of $137,598, out of pocket expenses of $62,450, and in-house expenses of $36,559.