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• Pierce County wrestles with dog pound dilemma
• Ellsworth seniors offer second history book

By Judy Wiff, RiverTown Regional Editor

Local municipalities have until Dec. 15 to decide if they want to continue using the Humane Society of Pierce St. Croix.

The shelter, which has been losing money for the last two years, will continue to operate if enough municipalities agree to pay fees based on their populations.

Executive Director Theresa Jonas said the fee would be $6.47 per person if all 25 Pierce County municipalities participate and would drop to $3.87 per person if the 12 St. Croix County municipalities that have been using the shelter also agree to pay. At the higher rate, the township fees would range from about $1,000 for Isabelle to over $15,000 for River Falls.

But a representative of the city of River Falls, which would be the largest Pierce County user, has already said the city can't afford its roughly $84,000 share.

"If River Falls pulls out, that sends everybody's per capita sky high," Jonas said Monday.

River Falls has been contributing about $20,000 a year to the Humane Society. The city's annual fee would be about $49,000 if the St. Croix County municipalities participate.

Pierce County's Finance and Personnel Committee voted Friday to forward a resolution to the County Board asking it to "undesignate" the Humane Society as the county dog pound. Shelter operators have already notified the county that they will not provide the service to the county after Dec. 31.

As Pierce County's official dog pound, the Humane Society has annually received surplus dog license fees. That amount has ranged from $9,570 to $11,719 the past four years. The plan now is to return that money to the municipalities that collected it.

A resolution to increase the county's dog license fees by $20 apiece is still on the agenda for the County Board's Dec. 27 meeting. But Administrative Coordinator Curt Kephart said Monday the thinking is now that the board won't adopt that resolution.

Township chairmen fear a higher license fee will discourage people from licensing their dogs, said Phyllis Beastrom, secretary of the Pierce County chapter of the Wisconsin Towns Association. Also, board members don't want to lose the Humane Society. "Town chairmen do not want to be responsible for dogs," she added.

Beastrom said municipal budgets are set for 2006, but many officials believe they can find the money to pay the per capita fees.

"We don't use the pound a great deal, the county doesn't," said Pierce County Board Chairman Ron Anderson of Beldenville. He has insisted that animal control is a municipal, not a county, responsibility.

Judy Wiff can be contacted at regional@rivertowns.net

ELLSWORTH - The second volume of a history project chronicling life in Pierce County from 1900 to 1929 will be available starting Tuesday at the Senior Citizens Center.

Although "When We Were Young: Volume 2" was originally planned to record memories up to 1950, the center receive more than 50 contributions for the first 30 years of the 20th century, editor Eleanor Oltman said. Volunteers decided to publish those together and later publish a third volume dealing with the 1930s and 1940s, decades of rich experiences during the Great Depression and World War II.

If the adage "One picture is worth a thousand words," this volume illustrated with 222 pictures is worth 220,000 words, Oltman said.

That's not counting the 167 pages of text.

Family heirloom collections of photos from these early decades were made available by three families, including pictures of local scenes before been published.

The "When We Were Young" project began as fund raiser to bolster the center's operating expenses, she said. Enthusiastic response to Volume 1 resulted in four sold-out printings.

A reorder of that volume also will be available Tuesday.

Volume one retails for $10. Volume 2 will sell for $12 due to higher production costs.

Copies will be be available at the Office of Aging in the Pierce County Office Building, Ellsworth Public Library and Senior Citizens Center. Sales will be cash only, Oltman said.

For more information, contact the senior center.