SAN ANTONIO – A proposal to fine people caught dumping unwanted pets and other animals in San Antonio will get a council vote after all.
Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5), Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito (D7) and Councilman Marc Whyte (D10) filed a three-signature memo Friday morning to force a city council vote creating fines between $500 and $2,000 for people caught abandoning animals in the city.
As of Friday evening, it had already been added to the council’s Sep. 11 agenda.
The maneuver comes the day after Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones had the proposal pulled off a Thursday council agenda because it had been filed before she and the other new council members were sworn in.
“This is a public safety issue we’ve been working on for a year and a half. It has been fully vetted through the Council’s established process and is now ready for final action,” the council members said in a joint news release. “Despite the Mayor’s attempt to obstruct our legislative process, this policy will move forward. Animal abandonment threatens both residents and animals, and the City should act promptly to adopt this critical protection.”
Alderete Gavito was the author of the council consideration request (CCR) that prompted Thursday’s proposal, and the same trio of council members forced a previous meeting on Aug. 13 over what they saw as Jones overreaching her authority to change how council policy proposals move forward.
That battle appears to be ongoing.
CCRs are one of the primary ways that council members can suggest and promote policy changes in the city. However, the process is often lengthy, with multiple committee meetings before an idea goes up for a vote.
The Aug. 13 meeting was born out of Jones attempt to unilaterally change the CCR process.
The mayor had proposed what she called “CCR Process Efficiencies,” which included requiring the city manager’s signature on a CCR and an initial legal screening by the city attorney’s office before members could begin collecting signatures of supporting council members.
Jones also said CCRs that “did not get across the finish line” before the new council term would need to be be resubmitted.
After the Aug. 13 meeting — which was forced by Castillo, Alderete Gavito, and Whyte — Jones appeared to back off at least some of her changes, telling council members in a memo the next day “we will revert to the process outlined in the CCR ordinance.”
She did not, however, specifically mention the issue of resubmitting CCRs in her memo. Now, the issue is back.
The mayor repeatedly refused to answer reporters’ questions during Thursday’s meeting, but a spokesperson for her office emailed KSAT a statement on Thursday night after the story was originally published.
Though the statement did not admit Jones’ involvement, it did confirm the reasoning behind the withdrawal.
“Item 11 was pulled from the City Council agenda yesterday evening by the City staff, as the expired CCR had not been reviewed by the Governance Committee. As has been communicated, expired CCRs from the previous council may be resubmitted, and the Governance Committee will decide on how best to move forward once received.”
Spokesperson for Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones — Sep. 4, 2025
The Governance Committee is the first stop for new CCRs and is the only committee led by the mayor.
The same spokesperson emailed a statement from the mayor on Friday afternoon in response to the council members’ memo.
“I appreciate the council members’ advocacy for this legislation, but it is still important to remember that we are a new council and there are several members who did not have an opportunity to review the ordinance. Following the CCR process, all items must be reviewed by the new governance committee and this ordinance did not go through the new committee. These council members are skipping an important step in the legislative process. I believe that our new council has the responsibility to review proposals that did not complete the legislative process in the previous session.”
Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones
The council members disagree.
“There are no expired CCRs,” Whyte told KSAT on Friday. “Just because a new mayor comes into office doesn’t mean all the work that’s been done over the past six months to a year should just disappear.”
The trio say they believed the fight over the CCRs was finished after the Aug. 13 meeting.
“Through conversations with chiefs of staffs, right, there was the understanding in which our CCRs would continue to move through that process,” Castillo said. “And on the city’s dashboard, those that had been listed as ‘expired’ were now listed as ‘pending’ because of that conversation and direction.”
Jones’ chief of staff, Jenise Carroll, emailed the chiefs a list of “pending” CCRs on Aug. 26, asking them to confirm whether their council members planned to scrap them or push ahead in the CCR process.
Ryan Salts, the chief of staff for District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur, wrote back, “Some of these CCRs listed have already been completed and moved to ordinance - confirming that we’re only looking at the onces (sic) that haven’t gone to a committee?”
Carroll responded, “If the CCR is approved then no action is required. If the CCR is pending and not approved then action is required.”
Even if Jones continues to push to have CCRs go back through the Governance Committee, Friday’s maneuver shows council members could easily side-step her.
“It’s like having basically city council veto power,” Prof. Jon Taylor, the chairman of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Department of Political Science and Geography.
For Taylor, it’s a strange hill for the mayor to decide to fight on.
“But why this issue? There are other pressing issues that she could dig in deep and say, ‘No. We’re not going to go. This is the line I’m not going to cross,’” he said. “Animals? Not so much."
Peacocks, puppies, ponies and pests
Though the proposal would cover all animals, not just dogs or cats, its origins were much more exotic: peafowl.
Alderete Gavito’s Northwest Side district includes the Glen Oaks and Dreamhill Estates neighborhoods, where peacocks and peahens roam in colorful flocks.
In March 2024, the District 7 councilwoman filed a CCR that asked to make San Antonio a bird sanctuary where unlicensed people would be fined for relocating birds.
“Working through that CCR, we recognized that we needed to do something because we had some instances where people were trapping and relocating the peafowl to other locations,” ACS Director Jon Gary told KSAT earlier this week. “I think some were dumped in Woodlawn Park, which was one of the locations that some got relocated to."
The proposal was reviewed in three Public Safety Committee meetings. It appeared to have been expanded after the most recent Public Safety Committee meeting in April, when the committee voted to send the proposed code changes to the city council for a vote.
“And, as I was working with our team, I realized that we don’t really even have an abandonment ordinance for any animal in San Antonio, which, for a municipality our size, is kind of uncommon,” Gary said.
“So, I started — what we ended up doing was approaching the councilwoman and saying, ‘Let’s not just make this about peafowl. We can actually address abandonment for all animals."
Though abandoning animals is already against state law, Gary said enforcing that when there is no harm to the animal can be difficult.
The proposed municipal fines council members were expected to consider would be between $500 and $2,000 for a first offense, between $1,000 and $2,000 for a second offense and $2,000 for a third offense and beyond. An ACS spokeswoman said those fines would be per animal.
Those figures put the fines on par with those for ear cropping, failing to report hitting an animal with a car or violating dangerous dog requirements.
“Whether that be in a parking lot, bus stop, it doesn’t matter,” Gary said. “You can’t abandon any animal here in San Antonio.”
The previous city council also approved higher fines in December for dog bites and other repeat infractions.
At the Animal Defense League (ADL) of Texas, abandoned animals can be a problem, despite posted signs that say leaving them alone is against the law.
On Aug. 31, six Chihuahua-mix puppies were left in a box at a donation station in the parking lot of a Northeast Side campus.
Staff found the approximately eight-week-old puppies “very hungry and extremely thirsty,” said ADL of Texas Director of Marketing and Development Felicia Nino.
“They could have just easily crawled out and been walking around the parking lot and possibly, you know, gone onto Nacogdoches (Road),” Nino said, while holding one of the dogs named “Zebra.”
ACS said it has found other types of abandoned animals, such as a pony left tied up at a baseball field in 2019.
Residents could unwittingly find themselves in violation of the ordinance, which would also cover wild animals caught in live-release traps.
ACS recommends contacting licensed professionals or Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation to help with the relocation of any trapped animals.
Gary said officers would also use their discretion when enforcing the fines.
The full three-signature memo can be read below.
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