By Jenny Neyman
Photos courtesy of Dale Lawyer. Ares the German shepherd delights a child at a community event. Dale Lawyer, an engineer-paramedic with Central Emergency Services, used the dog in educational and community outreach programs, as well as training him for search-and-rescue operations. Ares was suspended from CES’ budget last week.
Redoubt Reporter
As a working dog trained in search and rescue, Ares the German shepherd is the equivalent of 20 to 30 human searchers. After scenting on an item from a missing person, it takes as little as some disturbed vegetation or a faint puff of wind carrying an odor and Ares can find that person, miles away, on the other side of a lake, even if the trail is a day or more cold. Owned by Dale Lawyer, a paramedic/engineer with Central Emergency Services, Ares was a resource for the entire peninsula, able to aid in search-and-rescue operations at a moment’s notice.
But as of last week, due to a decision made in union negotiations, Ares is cut from CES’ budget, leaving Lawyer to search for answers and a way to get Ares back to work.
“If there’s a 5-year-old child that’s lost right now, we can’t go,’” Lawyer said Thursday. “It’s just really sad for something that service area members paid for. Your tax dollars paid to get this dog in service, yet you have to go to some mom and say, ‘Yeah, you paid for all this, but we’re not going to use it.’ That’s just not acceptable.”
Lawyer got Ares as a puppy from a breeder in Anchorage a little under two years ago. Lawyer purchased Ares himself, for about $1,500, and began training and evaluating him to see if the pup would be viable as a search-and-rescue dog — the only on the peninsula. When it was clear Ares was up to the task, Lawyer approached CES Fire Chief Chris Mokracek and the board of directors for Central Emergency Services and pitched the idea of bringing Ares on as a CES resource.
“Usually, they purchase the dog and cover the training. I wanted this to go so bad my family purchased the dog. We really wanted to get this going,” Lawyer said. “This is something I’ve seen that we’ve needed. I’ve been with Central Emergency Services for quite awhile now, and we’ve had a number of fatalities where a dog could have been brought in and I know the consequences would have been a lot different.”
Lawyer said the department and board were behind the program when he presented it last winter. The board set a $10,000 budget for the year, with $2,000 to $3,000 to pay for equipment and the rest to send Lawyer and Ares to training Outside to get the dog certified to do up to 24- to 36-hour trailing searches. Lawyer pitches in to cover costs for the dog, which lives with his family, and a community fundraiser raised about $3,000 to purchase equipment for him.
“Our board was mandating we do more for search and rescue and we hadn’t been doing it last year, as much as they had wanted to see. The board was 100 percent behind him, and the borough and everybody signed off on his budget last year without a problem,” Lawyer said. “For him to have a $10,000 budget, the board didn’t even blink an eye last year. He’s such a minute amount of our budget.”
Ares came to work at CES and also aids Lawyer in community outreach and a Lost in the Woods kids education program. Kids are taught how to stay warm, use signals, where not to hide, where to go to be found and how not to be afraid. Ares has been a hit with schools, kids, teachers and parents, Lawyer said.
“For the past year we’ve been constantly going to schools promoting the education program, trying to help kids, and the kids love him,” Lawyer said. “It’s going to be crushing for the kids because we’re scheduled up through summer school, and now we can’t go.”
Lawyer said he’s planning on spending another 10 years or so with CES, and wants to have Ares with him the whole time, which is the average span of a working dog’s career. Lawyer wants to get him certified in water and land cadaver searches and avalanche searches, as well.
“It’s not a moneymaker for me. He is a cost. It’s just the way it is, dogs cost. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme for me. He has to be on special dog food — he has allergies, like most shepherds do. It’s costly to have him,” Lawyer said.
Photo courtesy of Dale Lawyer. Dale Lawyer, an engineer-paramedic with Central Emergency Services, practices search-and-rescue techniques with his dog, Ares.
The money already spent on Ares is part of what irks him about his dog being cut, Lawyer said.
“And now they’re going to drop it all, and it’s just not acceptable to have this happen. It’s like you buy a diamond, you get it and then you send it back to the factory. You already paid for it but, ‘Here, you can just have it back.’ It’s just crazy,” Lawyer said.
“If all we did is search and rescue, and we didn’t do public programs and all that other stuff, I could see people having more of a problem with that amount of money. But with all he does, we’re constantly out doing public programs and doing the Lost in the Woods program for people. It’s invaluable,” he said.
Lawyer said he doesn’t know of anyone who has been unhappy with Ares or his performance. They haven’t failed any tests or received any poor performance reviews. The response to Ares has been glowing, Lawyer said.
“It’s not like we’ve been screwing up and not doing our job this year. I can’t find anybody who’s not happy with us, with what he’s doing,” he said.
And yet, Lawyer returned from a vacation last week and was told, “out of the blue,” that Ares had been cut, Lawyer said.
CES Chief Chris Mokracek said the decision came about as part of the budget process. Though Lawyer was given a memo saying the Line of Accounting for Ares had been terminated, more accurately the dog is suspended for now, pending review by the legal department, Mokracek said. The reason was partially financial and partially a legal liability issue, and had nothing to do with Lawyer’s or Ares’ performance, he said.
“The dog is awesome. Dale has done an excellent job with it. We just have to prioritize services. We can’t have every idea that comes down the line,” Mokracek said.
Ares is a wonderful tool, but not one CES is mandated to provide, he said. By state statute, Alaska State Troopers are responsible for search-and-rescue operations. Troopers can request assistance from CES as needed, and in the past CES has worked to foster that relationship.
“This to me seemed like another way to become more valuable to the troopers and maybe be called more than in the past. I thought it was a good tool to bring forward,” Mokracek said.
But he said the costs associated with Ares have grown beyond what was originally anticipated, and Mokracek said CES administration found itself needing to prioritize funding on its core missions.
“The dog’s awesome. And people say you can’t put a price on someone’s life, but our dollars are finite. There’s not an unlimited budget. We can’t just add a lot of feel-good programs in these economic times. We need to look at every program we have going and really prioritize. We weren’t directed to do search and rescue, so we’re pulling back and focusing on our main mission, which is fire and EMS,” he said. “With a fire department, that tool has such a narrow scope. If we’re going to pay for something, say it’s $10,000 a year. Well, we can take that $10,000 and buy a thermal imaging camera, or there’s different tools to use on a more frequent basis.”
When Lawyer took Ares to South Dakota for training in October, he was told by the instructor that his department was required to pay him 3.5 hours of overtime a week to compensate him for the time and money he spends caring for, feeding and housing Ares, which would equal about $7,500 a year, Lawyer said. The requirement comes from the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the instructor advised him he’d better bring the matter up with his department, or else CES could get fined down the road, Lawyer said.
Ares’ budget for the upcoming year was estimated at $30,000, including the cost of further equipment and training. That’s higher than what the board and administration expected, Mokracek said.
Lawyer said that figure is inflated. It includes a lot of “fluff” stuff that could be taken out in negotiations. And the cost of training could be shared among other agencies in the state. All he really wants covered is the cost of training, the cost of four required, $75-apiece vet checkups, and language adding Ares to the contract, so he can’t be removed by an annual budgetary whim.
“This is negotiations, this is how it works. You put in more than you want if you want to get certain things. We just wanted to have the health checkups and something in there saying that he’s a part of the borough. That was our goal,” he said. “But none of that was able to get conveyed. We weren’t able to get any of this information across because they just shut it down. They threw (all the costs) in to inflate it so they could have something to say, ‘That’s why we cut it.’”
Mokracek acknowledged that $30,000 is a “high-end figure,” but said the exact dollar amount for training or equipment isn’t really the issue.
“We run into federal labor laws. There’s absolutely no sidestepping or negotiating on that, so that becomes animal in itself that we have to look at. We never planned on budgeting that much. That was never really the intent,” he said.
Part of the problem, Mokracek said, is that if Ares is utilized beyond the boundaries of CES — if he’s sent on a search and rescue in Homer or if Lawyer teaches a Lost in the Woods class in Kenai, for instance, CES pays for it, including Lawyers’ overtime.
“We’re not supposed to spend CES funds outside of the service area, so we’re running into those issues,” Mokracek said.
Lawyer said he thinks the FLSA overtime issue and the attempt to have Ares written into the contract were the real reasons why he was told Ares was cut. He said he was frustrated by how the decision took place. Because the borough and union are in negotiations this year, the usual budgetary back-and-forth didn’t happen, he said. Lawyer said the CES board didn’t even get to decide Ares’ fate.
“The borough nullified that whole process for us this year. They came in and said that we can’t do that. They just axed him. They told the fire board that it was off the table for discussion and because it was a legal issue they couldn’t discuss it anymore,” Lawyer said.
Lawyer said he requested and was not granted a meeting with Mayor Dave Carey. Instead, he met with Susan Wilcox, special assistant to the mayor, on Wednesday. He said she told him the borough never intended to take on a dog and that the cost was too high. Lawyer said he left the meeting feeling like it was “all smoke and mirrors.”
“It was just bizarre. She didn’t know anything about the FLSA stuff that I brought to them. She called in our assistant chief and when she did he said, ‘Oh, the FLSA stuff you brought to us in November that you talked to the chief about?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ I can’t help it if they don’t communicate about it,” Lawyer said.
Lawyer said Wilcox told him the CES board was not in support of keeping the dog. But Lawyer said that when he called a fire board member, he was told the board didn’t have any say in the decision — that it was going directly to the mayor and it was off the table for discussion.
“I 100 percent believe it’s a union negotiation thing and it was that issue of us trying to get him written into the contract,” Lawyer said. “I could take it a lot better if he’s been a failure and not passed his certifications or if he’d been asked numerous times to come out into the public and been asked to do things and we didn’t do anything. But this has been something that’s been going full steam ahead, 110 miles per hour, and all of a sudden they’re pulling stuff out from under you.”
Len Malmquist, CES board member, said he wouldn’t speak for other board members, but that the decision to cut Ares was not made by the board.
“It was in the budget process. We were informed that the union was negotiating something with Ares, then we were told Ares was taken out and that was all we were told,” Malmquist said. “The board voted when Ares was brought on to bring him on as a tool for the department to use for search and rescue, and at that time we were kind of told there would be no costs involved in it other than training costs, which the board did approve.”
Malmquist has been on the CES board for eight years, and had a 38-year career in fire services.
“Union negotiations sometimes impact programs, yes. That’s just part of being in the public sector using tax dollars for funding,” he said.
Mokracek said he thinks Mayor Carey is getting a bad rap for the situation, and that the decision was based on CES administration’s recommendations. Mokracek said part of the details of the decision get into union negotiation issues, which he can’t discuss. From his perspective, he said he thinks Ares is a great tool, but one that would be better operated outside CES’ budget. He recommends that Lawyer seek sponsorships for Ares and the Lost in the Woods program, and offer the dog’s services as an independent contractor. That way, he can operate anywhere troopers, schools, church or community groups want him to.
“Yes, we’ve invested some money into it to get him certified, which is an awesome thing. At this point there’s a lot of community support behind it, I believe. It’s a good program that I think could flourish and continue through private sponsorships,” Mokracek said. “I believe it’s a program that can continue boroughwide with community support and community sponsorship, where service area dollars are not involved. He can go to Homer or other areas without CES having to foot the bill for it.”
Lawyer said Ares is a working dog and needs to have something to do. He could transition him into dog sports but would rather have him serve as the tool for which he is intended. But forming a nonprofit organization and operating as an independent contractor would be difficult. Lawyer said he would have to cover the costs of insurance, training and equipment on his own, which could be prohibitive.
“The bad thing about that is then I have to charge people like $2,500 a time to go out,” he said.
Lawyer said he plans to make a presentation to the borough Assembly at its April 6 meeting to try to convince assembly members to reinstate Ares.
“To me, it’s ridiculous because the service area people already paid for this and we’re ready to go. To me, it just doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Editor’s note: Susan Wilcox did not return a call seeking comment for this story.
