With the current contract for animal services set to expire in less than a month, Pueblo City Council on Monday night gave approval to a new three-year contract for PAWS for Life Animal Welfare & Protection Society to operate the animal shelter and to conduct animal control.

Council voted 4-3 on a resolution to award the contract for the shelter to be run by PAWS.

Councilmembers Bob Schilling, Dennis Flores and Larry Atencio voted against the resolution.

The Board of Pueblo County Commissioners now will consider the deal at an upcoming meeting. The city and county co-own the shelter. If the county doesn’t approve the deal, the city could be left on their own operating the shelter, according to what City Manager Sam Azad said Monday night during the meeting.

The current animal services contract, which is held by the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region, expires on Dec. 31.

PAWS for Life — a no-kill private shelter located in Pueblo —was recommended for the contract over HSPPR and Soldiers Security Protection by an evaluation committee made up of two county employees, two city employees and one appointment jointly decided upon by both the county and the city. The proposals from the three entities who bid on the contract were scored by the committee based upon four criteria identified in the request for proposal.

Concerns about the evaluation process and a skewed score were raised at the meeting Monday night.

Flores said one of the committee members skewed the results of the evaluation by giving HSPPR an unusually low score.

Each of the four criteria were given a score, with a maximum total amount of 100 points. One of the evaluators gave PAWS for Life a 90 and HSPPR a 65, according to Flores. The next lowest score HSPPR received was a 85. The lowest score PAWS received was a 77. The final combined scores ended up being 438 for PAWS and 415 for HSPPR.

Three of the five evaluation committee members scored HSPPR higher.

“I don’t believe this process really meets the smell test,” Flores said. “When you look at how this was scored, how you could come up with a 65 is literally impossible given their (HSPPR’s) professional staff, their track record, their financial statements, the whole nine yards.”

Anita Crain, the county’s purchasing director, told council Monday that she’s been doing her job for 23 years and has never seen an evaluation skewed so much by one person.

“In my opinion, the evaluator may have been biased,” Crain said.

HSPPR was given a three-year animal services contract in 2016, and has been under fire by some in the community who are unhappy with the organization’s live release rate of animals and for, what they have said, in not doing more to find other alternatives for animals besides euthanasia.

To that end, City Council voted 4-3 in February to approve an ordinance that established the Pueblo Animal Protection Act, which requires the operators of Pueblo Animal Services to follow a set of protocols before euthanizing an animal and maintain its save rate above 90 percent. The shelter’s save rate at the time the ordinance was passed was just above 80 percent.

PAPA has not been adopted by the county commissioners, however.

Because of that, the three entities who bid on the contract were asked to submit two proposals: one with PAPA being applicable and one without it being applicable.

PAWS’ bids were $1.7 million both with and without PAPA being applicable, according to the city. And HSPPR’s were $2.2 million with PAPA and $2,011,228 without.

The price difference played a big role in the decisions of the four council members approving the contract.

rseverance@chieftain.com