Mosquito presentation put off, but council will still have special video meeting to change employee leave policy

Mayor Grayson Vandegrift has postponed a presentation he planned to make at a special City Council about a mosquito prevention program, but the council will still have a special meeting late Monday afternoon to amend city-employee leave policies to conform to new federal guidelines.

The meeting will begin at 5 p.m. and will be held by video teleconference. Since the meeting will be so short, Vandegrift said in an email, "It would be silly to send everyone in. . . . The attorney general recently issued an opinion allowing us to do this, and we can still record it like normal."

The state Open Meetings Act requires that a public agency “precisely identify a primary location of the video teleconference where all members can be seen and heard and the public may attend” and “provide meeting-room conditions, including adequate space, seating, and acoustics, which insofar as is feasible allow effective public observation of the public meetings.” Attorney General Daniel Cameron's opinion says, “For a public agency to identify a primary physical location to conduct a video teleconference and invite public attendance at that location would contravene all of the guidance from the president of the United States, the governor, and public-health officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In this state of a proclaimed national emergency and under a similar declaration by the governor, it is the opinion of this office that it is not currently 'feasible' for public agencies to be required [to] 'provide meeting-room conditions'—in the sense of a physical location where observers would be in close proximity to each other.”

Monday's meeting will be held via the online meeting platform Zoom, which observers can download for free. The meeting's login code is here, but Vandegrift said he may be able to livestream the meeting on Facebook. "Monday’s meeting is our trial run, as we’re figuring out all our capabilities," he wrote. One bit of advice from a Zoom user: Mute your microphone. You can also turn off your camera.

'The case of the curious cat' remains unresolved; ordinance committee to consider issue

This story has been corrected.

The concern about lethal traps endangering pets remained unresolved at the Midway City Council meeting Monday night. At the last meeting, on Sept. 6, council members tabled the discussion after they were pressed to answer a letter from a concerned resident whose cat was killed in her neighbor’s yard by a trap set for groundhogs.

This meeting didn't make much progress on the issue either. After a 35-minute debate, council members concluded that the issue needed more public input, so they referred the mater to the council's Ordinance and Policy Committee. agreed to invite the Midway community to voice opinions on it at the next council meeting, on Oct. 10.

Sarah Gilbert was the owner of Bunny Kitty, the cat killed in a lethal trap set in a neighbor's yard back in August. Gilbert acknowledged the friendliness of neighbors and good character of Midway, but she believes that lethal traps don't belong here.

"I really don't think kill traps keep with the spirit of community that we have in this town," she told the council. It is legal to set lethal traps for animals pests in Midway, but Gilbert and her boyfriend, Stewart Surgener, reiterated her written request for an ordinance to ban them.

Members were sympathetic to the loss of Bunny Kitty, but not to the point of taking action.

"I'm not certain that we can enforce this," said Council Member Libby Warfield. Instead of banning lethal traps, Warfield suggested they urge members of the community "to take more personal responsibility" and communicate with neighbors if they resort to using such traps for animal pests.

Gilbert disagreed. "Just because you can't enforce a law all the time, doesn't mean that it still shouldn't be law," she said.

Council Member Daniel Roller Steven Craig said existing ordinances that could make banning lethal traps problematic. He posed the questions: Should pets be on a leash, and do trap owners have rights "if a neighbor's pet is on his or her property?" These questions and more will be examined by the Ordinance and Policy Committee, which Mayor Grayson Vandegrift says will also research how other cities have handled similar situations.

"We're dealing with one unheard element here," Vandegrift said. "We just need to see other ideas of how people handled this."

The case of the curious cat tugs heartstrings and spurs debate at Midway City Council meeting; more to come

By Marjorie Kirk
University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media

Paul Chism, a vice president of Lakeshore Learning Materials, said during Tuesday’s city council meeting that Midway’s culture was one of the motivations for the company’s decision to set up business there. Despite this culture that residents enjoy, every place has its pitfalls.

Bunny Kitty, taking a nap before her final misfortune (photo provided)

Soon after the council approved agreements with the new industry, members were pressed to answer a letter from a concerned resident whose cat was killed in her neighbor’s yard by a trap set for groundhogs. The case of the curious cat became the day’s most time-consuming concern, Council Member Libby Warfield told her colleagues.

Sarah Gilbert said in her letter that she and her boyfriend, Stewart Surgener, moved to the 100 block of South Turner Street in 2010 with her cat, Bunny Kitty. For years the feline wandered the neighborhood and returned home without consequence.

A crawl space in a neighboring yard had been missing a door for quite some time, and Gilbert noticed that groundhogs had moved in. She was not worried about them bothering her family or pet. On the evening of Aug. 9, Gilbert said in an interview, she discovered Bunny Kitty lying still with what she thought was a pile of leaves covering her. But when she went outside she discovered her beloved cat had been killed by a lethal trap. Surgerner spent about an hour trying to pry their pet out of the rusty old trap, set just outside the crawl-space opening.

“A cat can’t say no to a space like that,” Surgener said in a joint interview, “because they would naturally think there was vermin in there.”

Gilbert said, “All four of those houses, you can just walk across the yard. There’s no fences. It’s in this very open place next to a house, accessible to children and dogs and any person that would wander around.”

It is legal in Midway to set lethal traps for animal pests. After the council meeting, Warfield said Midway Baptist Church had hired a pest-control company to deal with the groundhog infestation in its properties behind the church. She said the trap was set "as a last resort" because the marmots are too smart to enter live traps.

Gilbert said the church had no intention of causing harm to Bunny Kitty, but she sees a problem if such traps like these continue to be set. She submitted her concerns, and photographic evidence of her cat's demise, to the council and asked it for an ordinance banning lethal traps.

“Nothing will change what happened to Bunny Kitty,” Gilbert wrote. “Adding this provision to the Code of Ordinances, and so making our best effort to ensure that this does not happen to another pet, will be of some comfort.”

Gilbert's story stirred the council, but Mayor Grayson Vandegrift said he did not think the unfortunate death of Bunny Kitty could be remedied by city intervention, and “We can’t prevent all of the sad things that happen.” Vandegrift and Warfield said they had never heard of such an episode in the city.

“If this were a problem that kept occurring, we would have to do something about it,” Vandegrift said. “But I don’t know that anything we do is going to bring that cat back. I don’t know that we’re going to prevent that from happening again.”

Council Member Sara Hicks argued Gilbert’s case, saying that there were other methods that could keep the public and their pets out of danger, such as signs warning pet owners and residents with children that a dangerous trap had been laid in the yard.

Warfield said she worried that Gilbert’s suggestion to ban kill traps would encourage residents to use other more harmful means of pest extermination. “I am as much of an animal lover as anybody in the state but when you take this away … when you have groundhogs eating up your foundation and digging and tearing up, they’ll be poisoned,” she said. “When people use poison that’s even more inhumane.”

Hicks persisted, and the council informally agreed to readdress the concern at the next meeting, at which Gilbert will have the chance to come in and plead her case. In the interview, Gilbert said she was out of town at the time of Tuesday's meeting, but said she plans to attend the next one, on Sept. 19.

Vandegrift said he didn't know how the council could enforce an ordinance requiring warning signs. "It seems like government intrusion," he said.

Hicks second-guessed her own idea: “The only thing is, cats can’t read those signs.”

Mosquito spraying rescheduled for Monday night

The state Department of Agriculture will be in Midway on Monday, July 26 at 9 p.m., weather permitting, to spray for mosquitoes. The spraying was scheduled for last Monday evening but was called off because of rain.