Britney Tennant, CEO of the Cheyenne Animal Shelter, told city council members at a work session that the shelter is seeking a combined city-plus-county contract payment of $1,000,000 for the next fiscal year to help close a budget shortfall.

Tennant framed the request around a new cost-recovery accounting model that uses the prior fiscal years actual sheltering expenses as the baseline and reconciles annually so the contract more closely matches real costs. "What we're asking you for this year to start to close that gap is a million dollars," Tennant said during the presentation.

Why it matters: The shelter presented data that the sheltering program's fiscal-year actual cost was about $1,700,000, with roughly $1,190,000 allocated to jurisdictions and about $540,000 attributed to the shelter itself under the current allocation method; Tennant said the shelter's current contract funding is approximately $900,000. She said the $1,000,000 request is a modest step toward covering prior-year expenses (she characterized the increase as covering roughly 84% of prior-year costs under the proposed method) and said the long-term goal is to fully align contract funding with actual service costs so donors do not have to subsidize routine operations.

Tennant described the accounting changes the shelter made to keep contract-funded activity separate from fundraising, outreach and community-health programs. She said transfers from other agencies, returned adoptions for which the shelter later collected an adoption fee, out-of-area drop-offs and fundraising-program expenses are excluded from the contract valuation to avoid billing the city or county twice for the same activity. "We have excluded those intakes from the valuation," she said.

Council questions focused on implementation details. One councilmember asked whether the $1,000,000 request was solely from the city; Tennant replied it was "a combination of the two" — a single, combined request to be divided per the jurisdictions customary split. Council members pressed on the shelter's reliance on its foundation: Tennant said the Cheyenne Animal Shelter Foundation provides significant support (the presentation showed about 25% of the shelters operating revenue coming from foundation support), but she warned that the foundation was never intended to sustain day-to-day operations and is drawing on principal. Tennant said foundation support has been deliberately reduced in recent budget cycles and that the foundation pledged an additional $150,000 this year toward a long-overdue roof replacement.

On an operational note, Tennant said the shelter currently covers many costs through fundraising and in-kind donations and that the new model will allow annual reconciliation to match the contract to actual costs. She also emphasized the nonprofits staffing experience and partnerships with local veterinarians as reasons to continue the contract relationship.

Next steps: The presentation closed with councilmembers thanking the shelter for the additional accounting detail; there was no formal motion or vote at the work session. Council members said the request and the new cost-recovery model will inform budget deliberations in the next budget cycle.