The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Taxpayers often bear costs to clean up after hoarders

Their living conditions can threaten personal, public health and safety.

A Clark County Humane Society worker removes a pet carrier full of cats from a house in Springfield. While cleaning up after animal hoarders is not cheap, no one knows exactly how much it costs taxpayers.

Bill Lackey/File Photo A Clark County Humane Society worker removes a pet carrier full of cats from a house in Springfield. While cleaning up after animal hoarders is not cheap, no one knows exactly how much it costs taxpayers.

ENLARGE PHOTO

Air Force intelligence center gets new commander May 30
3:03 p.m.
Beach Waterpark sued for failure to deliver
1:56 p.m.
Dayton gets boost from committee for UAV testing
5/24/12
Police headlines: Two accused of child endangering
5/24/12
Ad calls Brown career politician
5/24/12
> More headlines

By Katie Wedell  and Mark McGregor, Staff Writers 9:14 PM Monday, October 3, 2011

SPRINGFIELD — When the emotional story of compulsive hoarders is told on reality TV, the behind-the-scenes costs to local social service and government agencies are often left out of the picture.

Although it’s agreed that hoarding incidents are on the rise, there are no concrete statistics on how much taxpayer money is being spent on the problem. Most local agencies do not isolate the cost of dealing with hoarding in their budgets.

“(Cleanup) is not cheap, and it’s time consuming,” said Mark Pardue, who along with his wife, Donna, and her children operate DEP Property Solutions in Kettering.

He said they often work with Adult Protective Services or religious organizations to clear thousands of pounds of trash, collectibles, even unopened mail out of homes. The cost to the family involved quickly can add up to thousands of dollars, especially if the hoarding of animals is involved. When the clutter becomes a public health issue, and the family can’t afford the cleanup, the burden could fall to the city to dispose of the mess.

The Clark County Combined Health District decided the issue was pressing enough to form a Hoarding Task Force in 2005, a coordinated effort between the Department of Job and Family Services, the Combined Health District, Sheriff’s Office, Humane Society, the Springfield Fire Department, mental health services and several other agencies.

A Springfield News-Sun public records request of suspected hoarding cases revealed the Combined Health District had nearly 25 ongoing or new investigations of suspected hoarding cases involving animals in 2011 — many of those carry-over investigations from previous years. In 2010, the health district investigated nearly 40 complaints, equaling almost one complaint every 1½ weeks.

Coordinator Anne Kaup-Fett said that when the task force first formed, the problem wasn’t as common. “It used to be one or two once in a while,” she said. “But now it seems to be happening every week.” They do three or four combined inspections each month, she said.

The need for intra-agency cooperation became clear during one particular incident in which a property owner was being investigated by police, necessitating a search of a house that was full of stuff, Kaup-Fett said. Police officers called several different agencies to the home simultaneously, raising questions of who was in charge of what tasks.

“It led to a discussion,” she said. “Did we really understand the roles of the other agencies?”

Now, when a situation arises, a combined inspection takes place involving a team of representatives from the Humane Society, the Combined Health District and Sheriff’s Department. “One of us usually has legal jurisdiction,” said Dan Chatfield, environmental health director for the health district.

Frequently, there are problems with the health of the animals and with the accumulation of waste materials from the animals. Sometimes, the neglect is so severe that it is considered animal cruelty, according to information from the Clark County Hoarding Task Force.

In the news recently was the case of Howard “Jeff” Burgess who pleaded no contest to and was sentenced to five years probation for hoarding and abusing almost 400 dogs at his One More Chance Rescue and Adoption in Clark County. Burgess was also ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation and to dissolve the rescue and cannot join any animal groups during his probation or own an animal for at least a year.

Consider also the nearly four-year long case of Loyce Ogden and her boyfriend, Craig Hunt, who were found guilty in November 2008 of multiple counts of animal cruelty.

That case was prompted with a single complaint filed in February 2005 in which the reporting person said the couple’s rented 2425 Beatrice St. home had 50 cats living in it and was emitting an “unbearable” smell. The case ended with the Humane Society and Health District removing nearly 100 dead cats and 53 more live ones from the home and declaring the property uninhabitable in September 2008.

“It was a hell of a situation,” Ogden said Thursday. “I was at the point of a nervous breakdown. I felt like I was in an impossible situation”

“I learned from that and will live with that always,” she said. But “the issue is not hoarding, I’m just concerned with a helpless animal that doesn’t have a voice and nobody cares.”

But the Health District has warned the couple recently that they are in violation at their 137 Trenton Place home, near North Limestone Street and Home Road, that their cats are not up-to-date on their rabies vaccination.

The warnings came after the health district received a complaint July 25 from someone at a nearby business indicating two dead cats were on the company’s property and employees have observed at least 10 live cats in the home’s yard. Ogden said on Thursday she was not missing any cats at the time of the complaint and that it was unlikely that the dead cat found in July was one that went missing in April.

A combined site inspection by the Combined Health District and the Humane Society on July 26 found only two of at least 12 adult cats and kittens in their care were confirmed vaccinated for rabies, according to the complaint investigation form. Ogden was able to prove vaccinations for two more cats the next day.

1 | 2 next page »

Share this article