What Is Justin Brannan Hiding About His Failure to Establish a NYC Animal Welfare Department?
The comptroller hopeful's much-hyped 2019 bid to remove NYC ACC oversight from the city health department only made things worse for animals and advocates. Rather than explain, Brannan is obfuscating.
The Scoop New York is a newsletter dedicated to covering the movement for a true no-kill New York State, from Buffalo to Brooklyn. NYC ACC KILLS, published by TSNY, enumerates and memorializes adoptable cats and dogs who were nonetheless exterminated by Animal Care Centers of New York City.
Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn
It’s February 7, 2025. This is The Weekly Poop.
This week, New York City Council Member Justin Brannan’s bid for city comptroller got some love from a couple of unions and a crony.
Termed out as a Brooklyn council rep, Brannan is running for the Democratic comptroller nomination against current Manhattan borough president and former City Council member Mark Levine, as current comptroller and former City Council member Brad Lander vies for mayor. None of these fellows want to be left standing when the music stops.
As it happens, both Brannan and Levine played key roles in allowing the city kill pound — the grossly incompetent and malevolently corrupt contractor currently known as Animal Care Centers of New York City — to surreptitiously secure a sweetheart $1.4 billion deal with Bill Dunning-Kruger de Blasio’s City Hall, keeping NYC ACC on the taxpayers’ ledger until 2052.
Needful to say, willfully or even accidentally shirking one’s duty to raise holy hell over a billion-dollar boondoggle is not the best look for politicians angling to be the city’s fiscal guardian.
And Brannan got up to more chicanery.
In 2019, the year City Hall and the City Council rammed through the ACC contract, I interviewed Brannan for a Gothamist story on the city’s failure to achieve no-kill status despite years of promises from electeds. Brannan’s schtick is hyping himself as a friend to animals, and at the time there was a package of pending legislation to address a surfeit of animal-related issues.
The centerpiece was a bill to establish a department of animal welfare, which would take over management of the city’s animal control apparatus from the city health department, which considers cats and dogs and other companion animals to be vectors of disease, and neglects them accordingly.
“It’s a very exciting time,” one advocate told me.
During our phone interview, when I broached the animal welfare department bill, which at the time I assumed Brannan was in favor of — being an “outspoken vegetarian” and all, not to mention the bill’s lead sponsor — his response was decidedly low-energy.
Here’s how I reported it at the time:
It remains to be seen whether a department of animal welfare, if established, is the key to finally reforming ACC. When Gothamist spoke with Council Member Justin Brannan, Intro 1478’s primary sponsor, he downplayed the notion, as an aide on the call expounded on ACC’s laudable live release rate.
By then, the anti-fix was in.
As most every legitimate NYC animal advocate can tell you, ACC’s official live release rate is a lie. It excludes an untold number of cats and dogs and other animals, including the young and healthy, who are put to death without being offered for adoption. ACC self-excuses these killings as a public service, and to ACC and DOH, those animals don’t count. So they literally do not count them among the exterminated. Keep in mind: ACC’s uncounted victims are only a percentage of its sum death toll.
Brannan also knows this. If he doesn’t, he certainly should. Regardless, the animal welfare department bill passed. Except not really.
Rather than establish a department of animal welfare, the bill was quietly altered to establish instead an office of animal welfare.
As the Shelter Reform Action Committee explained:
So how did it happen? TSNY filed a freedom of information request last year for records and emails pertaining to the animal welfare department bait-and-switch. What we got back from Brannan and his council co-conspirators was hundreds of pages of slop, with any meaningful correspondence redacted. Page after page completely blacked out. It would be funny, in a “Veep” sort of way, if it weren’t so dismissive and hateful.
Pay up and shut up: It’s what Justin Brannan and friends think their constituents deserve. Mark Levine, a Risa Weinstock devotee who co-sponsored the neutered welfare department bill, very much included.
The Scoop New York asked Brannan to speak to all those redactions. We received no response.
As for the animals, Brannan’s bill ultimately changed nothing for those unfortunate enough to find themselves at NYC ACC. In 10 years — counting the time before de Blasio gestured toward a couple of aides and said “You’re now an Office” — the so-called Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare has issued all of 40 press releases. It’s a bad joke. The topper came when Brannan and Levine feigned outrage at their own fuckery. Just to salt the wound.
Take it back, though. Brannan did change something. The City Council will never take up the issue again. Or at least not until thousands more cats and dogs leave the city kill pound in garbage bags.
But Justin Brannan would rather not talk about that.
Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:
Related ^: Tired of watching obsequious health committee chairs like Mark Levine and Lynn Schulman fete ACC, rather than reform it, advocates want the NYC Council to establish an animal issues committee.
You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the state, but not both.
Related: Good question!
Extra! Extra! Pols Pose for Pooch Publicity Pics, Pretend Peccant Kill Pound Other Pols’ Problem!
Buffalo’s acting mayor says his city is “in the final stages” of siting a new animal control facility after the press last year found animals living in their own waste, among other atrocities, at the present location.
Related: The Erie County SPCA is now registering kids for its April “kindness camp,” while civilized behavior is still legal.
It’s an election year for Rochester Mayor Malik Evans. Coincidentally, the new director of his notorious kill pound hosted a town hall meeting to “change perceptions” about what goes on there.
Lohud toured SPCA Westchester, which opened a new facility in Briarcliff Manor in 2021.
There’s a new park with a dog run at Highbridge Park in Washington Heights, which contrary to this dateline is not Inwood.
The former operator of a Clinton County rescue was sentenced to probation and fines a year after authorities seized nearly 50 dogs — many emaciated, two later euthanized — from her property.
Pit mix Rocco alerted his owner and her neighbors to a fire in their Baldwinsville apartment building and is credited with saving lives.
Rakeem Young and Chanel, who shielded one another from a machete attack in the Bronx, are together again.
Adoptables
NYC ACC will host two mobile adoption events this weekend, in Manhattan and the Bronx.
Sixteen-year-old Fancy Nancy, pictured above, was saved from NYC ACC and a domestic abuser (a man, if you can believe that) by Second Chance Rescue in Whitestone, Queens.
Fiona, also above, is three years old and ready to get her best life on at Lollypop Farm in Rochester.
Frasier, a 10-year-old hound mix, was also saved from ACC and awaits at Harrison’s Pet Rescue, with adoption fees covered.
Find New York adoptables near you on Dogs in Danger and Adopt a Pet.
Food recalls
The FDA announced no new pet food recalls this week.
Check here for info on earlier recalls.
Wow, excellent reporting Brad.