What It Takes to Get Answers About NY Animal Shelter Inspections

For weeks, state agriculture Commissioner Richard Ball ducked questions about NYC ACC shelter law compliance. Why?

Aug 01, 2026

The Scoop New York is a non-profit website and newsletter covering the movement for a true no-kill New York, from Buffalo to Brooklyn. NYC ACC KILLS, published by TSNY, enumerates and memorializes adoptable cats and dogs who were exterminated by Animal Care Centers of New York City.

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New York agriculture Commissioner Richard Ball. CACSA logo screen grab: New York State Animal Protection Federation. Photo illustration: The Scoop New York

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It’s August 1, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

It’s been five weeks since The Scoop New York first queried state animal shelter inspectors about what they found during two May visits to Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic].

After multiple follow-ups, via email and phone, the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, the agency responsible for regulating shelters and rescues, ultimately provided some answers.

Even so, there’s a significant amount of vital information New Yorkers still don’t have — and may never, due to the way new regulations for shelters and rescues were crafted, and how they came to be in the first place.

The state agriculture department, as the name implies, is mostly concerned with issues related to farming and food production. According to his bio, like his forebears, department Commissioner Richard Ball, appointed by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014, is a longtime farmer himself.

Since shelters and rescues also involve non-human animals, one supposes, they fall under the jurisdiction of NYSDAM, which handles shelter licensing and inspections. Makes more sense than assigning them to the state health department, at least.

As previously reported in this space, the NYSDAM ACC inspections came six months after new statewide shelter standards took effect. The new rules were passed by Albany lawmakers in 2022 as the Companion Animal Care Standards Act, a.k.a. Article 26-C.

After a three-year post-adoption grace period, the first year of “enforcement” — that is, the year of Our Dear Leader 2026 — is in actuality another freebie, with no penalties for non-compliance.

Good thing, too, since despite the 3.5-year runway and ACC’s annual budget of tens of millions of dollars, city health department deputy commissioner of not even pretending to give a shit Corinne Schiff failed to ensure the city kill pound was prepared. This is what happens when DOH devotes more effort to gaslighting and otherwise abusing New Yorkers than the job those New Yorkers pay them dearly to do.

So when NYSDAM personnel popped in on May 20, they found ACC deficient (the state’s term, though I could do no better) in 19 of 50 applicable areas. That’d be a D- to we layfolk.

Some screw-ups, like filthy kennels and a busted HVAC system, should be easy fixes. For reasonably competent nose-breathing bipeds, anyway. Others, like poor staff training and the inability to produce passable protocols for everything from enrichment to pain management to “humane euthanasia,” point to systemic negligence indicating the need for substantive (read: long-term) reform.

Except when NYSDAM returned nine days later, voilà, ACC had miraculously turned that D- to a perfect score. Uh-huh.

Spidey-sense tingling, on June 24 The Scoop New York sent NYSDAM a short list of questions. Innocuous ones, if all was on the up and up. Like which ACC facility or facilities was or were inspected; which deficiencies were found at which locations; and how, once issues were remedied, NYSDAM would ensure they stayed that way between inspections.

And the kicker:

After weeks of silence despite follow-up inquiries, on July 15, NYSDAM spokesperson Jola Szubielski told TSNY over email to expect a reply the following day. After that day came and went, on July 22, we resubmitted the original questions along with some additions.

For one, we asked where New Yorkers could find NYC shelter inspection reports, since they weren’t posted with other municipal shelters from around the state.

We also wanted to know if NYSDAM knew anything about, or had anything to do with, the reported ACC deadline for rescues to help remove dozens of dogs housed in now-prohibited (for shelters) pop-up crates — under the implied threat that, like thousands upon thousands of other ACC victims, those left behind would be exterminated.

Szubielski emailed again, on July 24, assuring responses were forthcoming. Friday morning, when this column was half finished, they arrived.

NYSDAM sent the following statement:

The Department takes animal health very seriously and is diligently working to educate shelter organizations about Article 26-C requirements, including conducting inspections under this new law. The Department does inspect the AAC [sic] locations under Article 26-C, which requires increased standards to be met to ensure the health and well-being of the animals in their care, and its most recent inspection of this facility found no critical or general deficiencies. If there are any concerns about the condition or welfare of an animal, we encourage the public to reach out to us with a complaint and we can help direct it to the right place.

NYC ACC inspection reports are posted here. Not with municipal shelter reports, but with rescues. Presumably this is because ACC is on paper an independent non-profit entity contracted by the city, though it functions — to the extent that it functions — under direction from a city agency that dictates its every twitch. Regardless, yours truly should have caught that, and didn’t. We’ll take the L on that one.

NYSDAM provided the following info on background, which while likely of no consequence to you, the reader, means it normally would have been relayed here in paraphrased form, sans bullet points, had time permitted.

As it is, tick-tock:

All locations are inspected individually. The location that passed inspection is the Manhattan location.
As of May 29, 2026, the Manhattan location is in compliance with Article 26-C, having corrected the items noted in the previous inspection.
Under Article 26-C, all facilities must have isolation areas available. In addition, they must have emergency veterinary protocols and protocols for control of infectious and contagious diseases. These are all reviewed at inspections.
Under Article 26-C, shelters or rescues assisting with an emergency response are permitted to use temporary housing for 45 days.

For those keeping score, then, though ACC is by far the largest shelter/rescue/kill pound in New York, the state’s shiny new regs apparently make no provision for continual monitoring of, say, disease spread, which in ACC facilities has long been as common as air itself. Check the receipts for some idea of the number of sick and suffering cats and dogs — the majority of them healthy when they entered the system — the good Dr. Brennen sees put to death rather than treated.

It is happening right now. Sure as you’re born.

Nor do we know how ACC coughed up multiple vet-approved protocols over the course of nine days. This is especially curious since ACC and DOH have for years ignored TSNY requests to produce protocols on subjects including how staff decides who lives and who dies — the aforementioned “humane euthanasia,” in bureaucratic nonsense-speak.

Not only do we not know where the protocols came from — Claude, anyone? — more important: what the hell guidelines was ACC following prior to May 20, 2026? Or did the dogs eat Risa’s notes right before exam time?

As to the deadline issued to networkers for the pop-up crate exodus, it more or less tracks with the 45-day “emergency response” “temporary housing” clause. Given that ACC is virtually always in the middle of one self-inflicted crisis or another, New Yorkers can expect that loophole to be stretched to the max, which would render it effectively meaningless.

What the hell guidelines was ACC following prior to May 20, 2026? Or did the dogs eat Risa’s notes right before exam time?

There is much to unpack related to Article 26-C. Grace periods and loopholes. The fact that, four-year lead time or no, many shelters and rescues can’t afford to comply with Albany’s unfunded mandate for pricey capital and operational improvements, to the extent that desperate pleas for the public’s help, and stories of facilities threatened or forced to shut their doors forever, have over the past three years become routine. Then there’s the figurative shoe pleather required to extract basic information on CACSA inspections.

Taken together, the shortcomings and caveats almost make the new rules seem like window dressing. Or a Trojan horse, even.

Truth is, there’s more to Article 26-C, and how it came about, than the regulations themselves. A good bit more. It involves bad-faith meddling by obscenely flush “animal welfare” non-profits, power-hungry kill-pound lobbyists with keys to the capitol, and deadly deals consummated in the dark with self-interested state lawmakers.

That story, now percolating, is still weeks to months away.

That’s all right. Commissioner Ball is in no hurry.

OFFICIALS RESPONSIBLE FOR NYC ACC OVERSIGHT

NYS Ag Commissioner Richard Ball: 518-457-2771; Email

Mayor Zohran Mamdani: Contact form

City Council Speaker Julie Menin: 212-788-7210; Email

Council health chair Lynn Schulman: 212-788-6981; Email

Comptroller Mark Levine: 212-669-3916; Contact forms

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: 212-669-7250; Email

City Council members: Lookup

Borough presidents: BX; BK; MN; SI; QS

NYC DOH Commissioner Alister Martin: 311; Contact form

NYC DOH ACC minder Corinne Schiff: 646-632-6496; Email

CHIEF NYC ACC VETERINARIAN

Robin Brennen, DVM: Email

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.
More from Albany: One of these things is not like the other.
NYC exterminates an adoptable companion animal every three hours and do-nothing City Council “animal welfare” chair Harvey Epstein is out trying to “save” gym equipment.
Criminals are openly hawking puppy mill puppies in Midtown as Zohran Mamdani’s NYPD openly refuses to enforce the law.
The Schenectady County Sheriff’s Office is blaming police dog Leonidas’ heat death on faulty batteries and not the fact that the department’s dogs are not allowed indoors when it’s scorching hot outside.
ICYMI [like yours truly did]: Buffalo Animal Shelter secured $412K in state grant funding and private donations for much-needed capital improvements; Mayor Sean Ryan, who ran on fixing the long-neglected municipal kill pound, says the city is still scouting locations for a new facility in the meantime.
Are Syracuse leaders finally committing to a city shelter after “more than a decade” of kicking the can?
Roslyn Heights in Nassau County has a new 24-hour veterinary hospital.
Don’t (yet) know what’s going on with Herkimer County Humane Society but it sounds serious and not necessarily in a good way.
Hudson Valley New York Senate rep Jim Tedisco is again calling on fellow lawmakers to adopt a state cruelty offender registry, after dozens of animals were seized from a residence in Schoharie County. Meanwhile, Susquehanna SPCA was quarantined after taking in “several” puppies with parvo from the site of the Schoharie County rescue.
Related: Add Ontario and Monroe counties to the list of those tired of waiting for Albany to establish an abuser registry.
Related: Marzipan and Nougat are said to be ready for adoption after recovering from injuries sustained when their previous owner, now awaiting trial, dragged them down a Queens street with his car.
Related: An Erie County man got probation for stabbing a dog to death thanks to weak state cruelty laws and a plea deal authorized by District Attorney Michael Keane.
Related: A domestic abuser in nearby Monroe County got a year in jail and a one-year prohibition on keeping companion animals for kicking his girlfriend’s cat to death, despite evidence of prolonged abuse.
A jockey abusing a horse? Alert the media!
Finally, Amsterdam News previewed a documentary about discrimination against people of color who work in shelters or are looking to adopt.