Sheriff asks for nuisance dog ordinance
Mitchell County will be officially taking over the local emergency medical service on Tuesday.
The county has previously used a private contractor for ambulance services. After the contractor began discussing selling the business to an outside company earlier this year, the Mitchell County Board of Commissioners decided to run the service in-house.
“The county will begin EMS ambulance services starting Dec. 16,” Mitchell County Manager Allen Cook said at a meeting of the Board of Commissioners last week.
Cook said that the county has made considerable progress in staffing the service.
“We did 41 interviews over the last … three weeks,” Cook said. “We’ve had 26 job offers accepted.”
Nuisance dogs
During the public comment period, Mitchell County Sheriff Donald Street asked the commissioners to consider enacting an ordinance to control nuisance dogs.
Street said that the state law, under which individual dogs can be declared dangerous and the owners can then be ordered to keep the dog tied up, is insufficient to deal with the number of poorly-controlled dogs in Mitchell County.
“Over the years it’s become a big problem,” Street said.
The sheriff mentioned a specific case where a county resident maintained around 25 German shepherds that were poorly disciplined and allowed to run loose. Street said that in that case, it was difficult to declare any one of the pack dangerous, because when they caused problems for the neighbors there was no way to tell specifically which of the 25 had become violent.
“They killed a man’s cow a few years back,” Street said.
Street said there are other county residents who keep large packs of unruly dogs.
“The dogs are chasing your car; … they’re eating your tires,” he said. “You hate to be the sheriff and tell people there’s nothing we can do, but there’s nothing we can do.”
Although he didn’t mention it at the meeting, Street announced later in the week that he will be running for county commissioner in 2026. He had already previously announced his intention to end his career as sheriff at the end of 2026.
At the meeting, Street suggested looking at other counties’ nuisance dog ordinances.
“At some point somebody’s going to get killed,” he said.