Elon’s municipal leaders have agreed to extend Burlington’s paw-hold over the animal services that its residents receive from the larger community.
This firming up of relations began last Monday night when Elon’s town council decided to keep using the animal shelter and pet adoption facility that Burlington operates on behalf of Alamance County. The council gave this arrangement a unanimous nod despite some misgivings about the cost-sharing formula that the city uses to fund its interjurisdictional services.
Moments later, the council reached another consensus to contract with Burlington for the animal control functions that Elon has historically obtained from its own municipal police force.
In each of these decisions, the council was guided along its way by Jessica Arias, who serves as Burlington’s director of animal services.
Arias had been invited to address the council on Monday to clarify some of the finer points about her agency, which serves Burlington, the unincorporated parts of Alamance County, and each of the county’s other cities and towns.
To this end, the city’s animal services director offered a two-pronged description of her agency’s overall mission.
“Our two focus areas are intake prevention and pet placement,” she went on to explain. “Ultimately our goal is to create positive outcomes for pets, their families, and the community.”
As part of this dual strategy, Burlington Animal Services has cultivated an aggressive spay/neuter program that ensures every pet which passes through the shelter is sterilized. In the meantime, the agency subsidizes low-cost operations for pet owners who choose to get their animals fixed. Burlington Animal Services also offers a variety of pet-placement options to adopt out stray animals or, if possible, reunite them with their original owners.
Arias stressed that this multi-faceted approach has enabled Burlington Animal Services to bring down its euthanasia rates from their peak in 2008. Since 2018, the shelter has obtained “positive outcomes” for more than 90 percent of the pets it has processed, allowing it to lay claim to the title of a “no-kill” facility.
Arias went on to concede that the sources of the shelter’s intake aren’t evenly spread out across Alamance County and its municipalities.
“The majority of the pets we receive come from the unincorporated parts of the county,” she said. “Elon is somewhere between two and zero percent, so we receive far fewer pets from Elon.”
Arias admitted that her agency’s records identified Elon as the source jurisdiction for just 72 pets in 2025 – or a little more than 1 percent of 6,401 pets that passed through the shelter that year. During this same period, Burlington accounted for about 33 percent of the shelter’s intake, while unincorporated parts of the county made up another 43 percent of the total.
Arias went on to observe that the past year also saw Elon contribute about 600 unique visits to her agency’s visitor logs. All the same, Elon’s administrators have seized on the town’s relatively small share of the shelter’s intake to argue that their community may be shouldering more than its rightful portion of the agency’s costs.
According to Burlington’s assistant city manager Rachel Kelly, Elon’s current pay in of about $91,000 a year comprises about 3.7 percent of the total annual budget for Burlington Animal Services. In response, Elon’s mayor pro tem Monti Allison insisted that it may behoove the town to hire third party contractor to deal with the small number of stray and unwanted pets that hail from its borders.
“We could hire somebody to pick up the six animals that we have per month,” he asserted
Arias insisted that she and her staff have struggled in vain to find an alternative to the population-based formula that Burlington currently uses to divvy up the animal shelter’s costs. Elon’s manager Richard Roedner has argued, for his part, that this per-capita method should be combined with a usage-based model, although his recommendation has yet to catch on with his counterparts in other communities. All the same, a recent decline in the town’s population has convinced Roedner to lower Elon’s next annual payment to just over $88,000.
During her presentation last Monday, Arias also touted some of the other programs that are available from Burlington Animal Services. These range from pet yoga and dog training referrals to free identification tags from the agency’s website. The agency also occasionally handles livestock and as well as a “Mighty Mousers” program, which allows farmers and others to get sterilized feral cats to keep the rodents in check on their property.
The proliferation of stray cats proved a particular concern for councilman Randy Orwig, who noted a large number of ownerless kitties near the grounds of Elon University. Arias stressed that the Mighty Mouser program tries to avoid these situations by making sure that people who sign up for the program release the sterilized felines on their own land.
In the meantime, councilman Steve Exum seemed impressed by the sheer number of programs that Arias and colleagues offer outside of Burlington.
“Y’all do a lot more than intake,” he told Burlington’s animal services director before last Monday’s vote, “but we’re not asking you about all the other services that our residents enjoy.”
“I think what you’re doing is amazing,” Orwig went on to concur.
The council ultimately voted 5-to-0 to renew its existing contract with animal services.
Its members also reached an informal consensus later that night to farm out the town’s animal control operations to the city of Burlington.
Since time immemorial, the town’s residents have turned to Elon’s municipal police force whenever they’ve found themselves in need of the proverbial dog catcher. Kelly Blackwelder, the town’s police chief, acknowledged that this role has occasionally left her officers punching above their weight in the pursuit of a stray.
“If you need someone who’s an expert in their field, you need them right then,” she informed the council, “and we just don’t have that.”
At Blackwelder’s suggestion, the council tentatively agreed to pay Burlington an annual sum of $8,036 to provide animal control field services in Elon. A final agreement about this arrangement is expected to come before the council in July.
In the meantime, Elon’s mayor Emily Sharpe offered Arias a suggestion to drum up more patronage among people outside of Burlington.
“I wonder if some people don’t take advantage of services other than intake because you’re called ‘Burlington Animal Services’,” she told the city’s animal services director. “I’m wondering if, in some of your posts, you could make sure to say that you serve all of Alamance County.”
