In the wake of a legal battle over a pet goat, Powell leaders have at least temporarily banned all other “wild animals and exotic pets” from the city.

“I don’t know that we’ve made a complete decision,” Mayor John Wetzel said in a Friday interview, “but as of right now, I think it’s just gonna be the way it is: There are no allowances for exotic pets.”

The sequence of events started last year, when a citizen told Powell police that someone was keeping a Nigerian pygmy goat at their home. Police notified the resident, Venus Bontadelli, that city ordinance generally prohibits goats from being kept as pets.

Bontadelli asked the city council to approve an exotic pet permit for her goat, Porsche Lane, but the council unanimously voted no last July, largely citing concerns about the precedent they might set.

Months later, Bontadelli sued the city in federal court, contending its permitting system was arbitrary. The city ultimately agreed to issue a permit for Porsche Lane in exchange for the suit being dropped.

At the Jan. 19 meeting where the city council approved the permit, Wetzel said that “obviously we would like to make some changes to clarify, clean up, create an ordinance,” but later mentioned that “we could also just say there are no exotic pets in the city of Powell.”

“I’m not saying we do that,” he added, “but I’d like to look at some of the discussion.”

The council directed City Attorney Scott Kolpitcke to look at ordinances from other municipalities around the region so they could look at some different options. Kolpitcke indicated they could repeal the existing permit process, then consider potential replacements.

The council finished repealing the old permitting system on March 2 without revisiting the idea of coming up with a new system for unusual pets. So for now, exotic pets are simply banned.

The city’s current ordinances define “household pets” to include “dogs, cats, canaries, parrots, and other small caged birds, hamsters, guinea pigs, and similar rodents, ferrets, fish, reptiles and other such species that normally would be kept at a dwelling.” Rabbits and chickens are also allowed with a permit.

Meanwhile, species or animals capable of “inflicting substantial physical harm to man” are specifically excluded as household pets, along with horses, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, ducks, peacocks, turkeys, geese, fowl, mink, chinchillas, snakes over 3 feet long and venomous creatures.

A bulletproof solution?

Wetzel indicated Friday that, based on his conversations with Kolpitcke, there were concerns the city would “have to spend hours and hours and hours trying to craft something that’s bulletproof, whereas the one bulletproof thing is no ordinance.”

As an example, Wetzel said the city would want to prohibit rattlesnakes, “but then the more we start clarifying it, we just get in trouble. So, you know, … we just couldn’t quite figure out an upside.”

However, that’s not a universal opinion.

In a recent letter to the Tribune’s editor, Bontadelli’s attorney in the lawsuit, Austin Waisanen of Cody, said the city could have fixed its exotic pet ordinance by setting basic conditions related to noise, smell, the animal’s characteristics and the owner’s behavior. Waisanen said he offered a draft to that effect.

“But rather than adopt a simple amendment, officials simply scrapped the ordinance altogether, fixing the novel due process issue raised by the case the way death cures disease,” Waisanen wrote.

Councilman Troy Bray had pitched his own draft ordinance in January that contained a specific set of criteria for permits. If the owner didn’t have any recent animal-related violations and showed they could care for the pet, and if the animal wasn’t a hazard, weighed no more than 80 pounds and wasn’t an invasive species, the city should issue a permit, Bray recommended. However, Wetzel said he saw “a few gaps” in the proposal and no action was taken.

Bray later cast the lone no vote on repealing the old permitting rules, which was “kind of on principle,” he said in a Monday interview. 

“We did have kind of a promise to make a good faith effort to fix the permitting process,” Bray said, “and I don’t think getting rid of it is really a good faith effort.”

He still thinks the city should establish a “sensible permitting process” for exotic pets, but he doesn’t believe there’s a lot of interest among the rest of the council to do anything.

“... it’s too easy to look over your fence and say, ‘I want to tell that person how to live,’” Bray said. “It’s kind of frustrating, but we do have an election coming up.”

What happens next?

Wetzel noted in Friday’s interview that the city’s enforcement of its pet ordinances is driven by complaints.

“If somebody wants to have some strange iguana that’s not going to cause any problems, if it’s in their house and it’s not causing any problems, then, who cares?” he said, guessing there were probably “plenty” of unpermitted snakes over the years.

“The bottom line is, what happens in your house is in your house,” the mayor said. “What happens in your yard is everybody’s business.”

Wetzel added that, if the city council is going to revisit the exotic pet issue, he’d like to wait until it decides what to do with its limit of two adult pets per household. The council recently agreed to consider upping that limit, after a family expressed a desire to keep the four dogs they moved to town with; they only learned of the city’s ordinance following complaints from neighbors.

The city’s planning and zoning commission was set to kick off the discussion about the two-pet limit at its Monday night meeting.