Photo by Noah Dawson
By Thomas Warren III
I’d like to take you back for a moment to 2014. That year, the Amarillo City Council was considering moving forward with a controversial pet registration ordinance that would have potentially cost local citizens hundreds of dollars per year to own a single pet in the city limits.
That proposed ordinance is what got my family involved with municipal politics for the first time, and it’s the first issue that I can really remember following closely. After the Paul Harpole-led City Council got decimated at the polls in the following May election, it went away. There have been murmurs about some type of ordinance from that mindset coming back at some point, and it looks like it’s here.
Our friends on the Amarillo Animal Management & Welfare Advisory Board have proposed a mandatory pet microchipping ordinance for consideration by the City Council. The ordinance has already been met with a lukewarm response from the City Council, with potential mayoral hopeful Les Simpson seeming to praise the idea behind it, and current incumbent Mayor Cole Stanley decrying it as government overreach.
After the reception it got at City Council, one of the members of the AM&W Board made a long social media post making the argument in favor of the ordinance. In all honesty, I hadn’t followed much of this until I heard about it late last week on an episode of KGNC-AM’s Making Sense with Michael J. (Shout out, MJ!)
I read the novel written by the board member in favor of the proposal, and I’ve seen the social media back-and-forth between supporters and opponents of the proposed ordinance. I’m not really planning on getting into all of that in this article because, well, I feel like most of it has already been covered by the echo chamber that is Facebook.
What I am planning to do is assess the ordinance at face value and tell you my initial thoughts off the cuff. You might be surprised at what I have to say.
Personally, I find a lot of the arguments in favor of the ordinance to be disingenuous. No, nobody is claiming microchipping your pets is akin to “the mark of the beast” from Revelation. At the same time, I really don’t think the people at Animal Management & Welfare have any plans to do door-to-door raids, scanning every animal for a microchip until they find another they can seize.
At face value, I’m not really that opposed to an ordinance promoting microchipping. It’s not nearly as invasive as the ordinance that was proposed in 2014, though many of the same voices who supported that ordinance are in favor of this one today.
I am still very cautious about this ordinance, and if I were on the City Council, I’d probably vote against it. Let me explain why.
There seems to be an argument being made by proponents of the ordinance that it’s necessary to reduce costs for taxpayers. The number that was quoted at Tuesday’s City Council meeting was that it costs roughly $185 per animal to be housed at the local shelter after being picked up by Animal Management & Welfare.
At the same time, this is a municipal ordinance, and almost all municipal ordinances are written to have an enforcement mechanism that involves a Class C misdemeanor designation. Class C misdemeanors in Texas are fine-only offenses, but a person still has to show up to the municipal court to defend themselves if they wish to challenge the ticket. With that being said, it is extremely common for people to receive tickets and never respond to them. Failure to appear to defend a ticket or to pay it will result in the issuance of a municipal warrant for the person’s arrest.
I was curious a few nights ago, so I looked to see how many municipal warrants are currently outstanding through the Amarillo Municipal Court. As of this writing, there are 22,015 municipal warrants currently outstanding in Amarillo. This number does not include warrants for other offenses outstanding in Potter or Randall counties, nor does it include individuals currently sitting in either local jail on a municipal warrant. Additionally, there are hundreds of cases working their way through the municipal court dockets.
Potter County’s jail roster also shows 128 defendants sitting at the jail as of this writing with a municipal charge. Now, in fairness, the vast majority of these individuals are also facing felony charges. However, it still goes to show the widespread nature of municipal warrants.
According to the Texas Office of Court Administration, from January 2025 to January 2026, the Amarillo Municipal Court disposed of 35,633 cases, while 34,263 new cases were filed. This same data shows that 8,472 cases were placed on inactive status during this same timeframe, while 8,951 were reactivated. This office’s guidelines further explain that inactive status often involves the case being paused due to the issuance of a warrant, while a case being reactivated often involves a defendant reappearing from a warrant.
This data shows that approximately 25 percent of all newly filed cases in the municipal court will result in the issuance of a warrant.
As widely noted, a few years ago, Randall County negotiated a new agreement with the City Council to cover the costs of jail bookings. KFDA reported at the time that the new agreement consisted of a measure to require the City of Amarillo to pay an administrative fee of $200 for every booking, as well as a fee of $100 per day for municipal inmates.
Now, think about this for a second. If every person who has a municipal warrant was arrested and booked according to Randall County’s fees, we’d be looking at $4.4 million in booking fees alone. This isn’t even to mention how much it would cost the City in daily bed fees.
All of this comes at a time when Potter County is struggling with jail occupancy issues. Do we really want to create yet another offense that’s going to result in more people in our already crowded jail? The argument is that this ordinance is going to reduce costs on taxpayers. If it results in more overcrowding at the county jail, I struggle to see how this will benefit taxpayers.
The AM&W board member who wrote the letter on social media in support of the ordinance closed by writing, “Education and encouragement are great, but sometimes it takes a law to convince the irresponsible to do the right thing.”
That sounds great in theory. The problem is that none of the ordinances or state laws currently on the books made the people with outstanding municipal warrants responsible for those things. Look through the warrant list, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Monday’s municipal court docket includes offenses ranging from Failure to Maintain Financial Responsibility to Driving While License Suspended. The existence of those offenses, which originate in state law, apparently did not deter the individuals charged from allegedly engaging in them.
I don’t think a law that creates another offense is actually a solution to the problem. Particularly when there are questions about the efficacy of mandatory microchipping ordinances to begin with.
In 2016, the United Kingdom passed a law making pet microchipping mandatory across the nation. Violators found guilty could be forced to pay fines of up to £500.
So, did it work? Not according to the data.
A 2023 survey found that the number of stray dogs in the United Kingdom had increased over a two-year period, and the number of stray dogs without a microchip also increased over the same time period. Even with a national law mandating compliance, millions of animals in the UK still remain unchipped.
I think all of this data shows something very clearly. We could pass this ordinance and end up in a situation where we have yet another law that results in more people being ticketed, more people being fined, more people having warrants issued for their arrest, more people in our already overcrowded jails, and greater expense to the Amarillo taxpayers. All of this is a risk with an ordinance that doesn’t even guarantee that it will be effective in its ultimate goal of reducing the shelter population and reuniting more pets with their owners.
What is the solution then? If local leaders are hell-bent and determined to pass some kind of ordinance about microchipping, following the lead of the City of Austin might be the best option.
Before you say anything, yes, I know it’s Austin — not exactly the best-run city in the state. Just hear me out, though.
In 2024, Austin passed a microchipping ordinance. That ordinance explicitly stated that violations would not result in civil or criminal penalties. At its heart, the ordinance simply encouraged people to microchip their pets, rather than forcing compliance through penalties.
Mayor Stanley is right. During Tuesday’s meeting, he said, “If we pass an ordinance like this, if we pass a new law, essentially we criminalize a good part of our community.” The only way not to do that, and still pass something, is to pass an ordinance written in the same way as Austin’s ordinance.
I do want to say, though, enforcement mechanism or not, we’re not suddenly going to have people lining up to get their animals microchipped because the government says so.
The government also says you have to have liability insurance to drive a car. Yet we have hundreds of cases currently pending involving defendants who are alleged to not have had valid insurance.
The government says you have to pay your property taxes. Yet, several times a year, both Potter and Randall counties have to hold foreclosure auctions because people won’t pay.
I don’t want to see any animals be euthanized in Amarillo. I want us to have a no-kill animal shelter and reunite as many stray animals as possible with their owners. However, I also know that passing a law to make “the irresponsible do the right thing” isn’t going to work when we have so many other government mandates that “the irresponsible” ignore.
To be clear, I think there is also a massive disconnect at City Hall about why people don’t comply with these public policy goals and laws. In some cases, yes, the violators are simply irresponsible. In other cases, however, the violators simply cannot afford to comply. Something that often gets lost in these conversations is that we have a significant portion of our population that lives in poverty.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, our poverty rate in Amarillo is 15.8%. That is roughly six points higher than the national average. This is why it is so imperative for our local governments to make services, taxes, and regulations affordable for our citizens. We shouldn’t make living here more expensive for people who are already struggling to make ends meet just because we can.
A law does not necessarily make people comply with a public policy goal. And given the unique challenges Amarillo faces right now with our jails, I don’t think this is the moment we should be creating another criminal offense with the goal of achieving a moral victory, particularly when there are other less invasive ways to achieve that same goal.