- November 6, 2024
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Palm Coast is amending its city ordinance on dangerous dogs to bring the local ordinance in line with state law.
“Because of some recent activity with dogs attacking people or other dogs, it’s had a spotlight on it,” City Manager Jim Landon said at a City Council workshop March 28. “But this change is not a result of those events, other than it just helps highlight the fact that our ordinance is not consistent with state law.”
The state law changed last year.
Among other inconsistencies, the city’s ordinance states that a dog found dangerous in the course of an animal control hearing “shall” be put down. That’s a stricter standard than state law, which says that such a dog “may” be put down.
The city requirement that a dog declared dangerous in the course of an animal control hearing be euthanized also differs from how a dog is treated when it’s declared dangerous by a city animal control officer’s order and the owner’s consent without an actual animal control hearing.
If the owner simply accepts the city animal control officer’s dangerous dog designation without requesting a hearing, the local ordinance does not require the dog to be destroyed; the dog may simply be subject to certain restrictions. But if the owner decides to fight the designation through an animal control hearing, and they lose, the dog, under local ordinance, must be destroyed.
That dilemma ensnared a local family that decided to fight a city animal control officer’s order that their pet dog be declared dangerous after a bite and confined. They lost at the hearing, and the hearing officer said that under the Palm Coast ordinance, she had no choice but to order the dog euthanized — even though the city had not requested that at the outset, and had instead indicated to the family that a loss at the animal control hearing would not mean that the dog would be required to be euthanized. The family has appealed the hearing officer’s decision to county court.
