The Mayor of Cedarville in Greene County, Ohio said his village of 4,000 people has close to 1,000 community cats — which has created some policy problems.
Mayor John Cody Jr. said he doesn’t know exactly why Cedarville has so many cats. His best guess is that Cedarville University students may house cats during the school year and then let them live outside in the summer.
To deal with what the mayor calls explosive cat population growth, the village started funding an evidence-based Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) program last year. Cody and the Village Council then realized that some of their current ordinances (probably written in the 1950s, Cody said), like a law that fines people who feed so-called feral cats, make the TNR program illegal or difficult to execute. Add to that, some people in the Cedarville community don’t like the “Return” part of TNR, Cody said, because of alleged property damage and because they feel pressured to feed the cats when they return.
Cody and the village council tried their hand at rewriting some of the village cat ordinances (2023-06) (2023-07) (2023-08), but then an organization called Alley Cat Allies, which advocates for a TNR strategy, said the revised laws as written could be “cruel” to cats.
DanaMarie Pannella, an attorney for the organization, rewrote those ordinances for the village in a way that she said were more effective.
“So it seems that they [Village of Cedarville] are well intentioned, but it [the proposed ordinance] just misses the mark as far as actually being effective legislation,” Pannella said.
In an interview with WYSO last week, Mayor Cody said he has decided to table all three revised ordinances, which were supposed to be voted on at today’s council meeting, and instead hold a town hall about the cat issue and then decide how to proceed in the next month or so.
“We want to make sure that we are balancing the concerns of the villagers with the concern of the cats themselves,” Cody said.
Still, in an email sent to WYSO on Friday, Alley Cat Allies said there will be a large demonstration against the now tabled ordinances from a broad coalition of local advocates before tonight’s council meeting starting at 6pm in downtown Cedarville in front of the Opera House.
Chris Welter is a reporter and corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms.
