A citizen-led campaign to improve how complaints about barking dogs are handled in the city is producing results.

At a meeting Monday in the Simi Valley Senior Center’s community room, Monica Nolan, the county’s new head of Animal Regulation (AR), told an audience of 50 or more that the call for a more responsive department had not fallen on deaf ears.

“What I’ve heard was that a lot of complaints came in and didn’t get to us or they got to the wrong person or they didn’t get there in enough time,” said Nolan, who replaced outgoing director Kathy Jenks in June. “So that’s what I looked at trying to address within my department.”

In addition to working with the city to create a new hotline dedicated solely to dog barking complaints, AR has agreed to improve its website, offer more education for dog owners and change some of its own policies—including the old system that forced Simi residents to travel to the county seat in Ventura to attend a public nuisance hearing.

Monday’s meeting was the third the city has held since May, when a group of upset residents came before the City Council to demand something be done to put more teeth into the city’s barking laws.

The first meeting was with those demanding change, the second with a group of dog owners who were concerned that proposed changes could go too far. Monday was the first time the two sides had met together.

Councilmember Barbra Williamson, the council’s liaison to AR—which the city contracts to handle all its animal services—presided over the meeting alongside Nolan and Debbie Solomon, the city’s head of community services.

“Originally when I talked with city staff, what they wanted to do was hold two meetings, hear the dog lovers and hear the complainers, but I thought, ‘This isn’t working,’” Williamson said. “We needed to have both groups in the same room so they could hear one another. . . . They needed to be able to converse, to go back and forth. They had to let it out, and I think they did.”

The two-hour meeting, for the most part, remained completely cordial, with both sides firing suggestions and rebuttals back and forth but allowing those with the floor to get their points across.

“I just wanted to make sure that both sides had equal representation,” said dog owner Conrad Wright when asked why he attended the meeting. “So that vindictive people can’t take advantage of the process to abuse it.”

Though a bevy of barking-related issues were brought up from both sides, the sticking point of the debate centered around one issue: the city’s current law requiring two complainants before a barking dog can be declared a public nuisance.

According to the law, at least two neighbors must sign an affidavit, keep a barking log and appear at a hearing in order to designate a dog a nuisance. Once a dog has been declared a nuisance, its owner must find a way to stop it from barking or AR has the right to forcibly remove the dog from the home.

Some residents were adamant that this was the part of the law that most needed changing.

“Why can’t it just be one signature? Why do I need to a drag another neighbor into this?” one resident said. “It just seems logical. I don’t think anything’s going to be fixed if we don’t change that requirement.”

On Monday at 6:30 p.m., the City Council will discuss new language for the city code that would allow exceptions to the two-complainant requirement “due to special physical circumstances such as topography, distance between the adjoining properties, placement of structures,” etc.

Residents who want to give input on the issue of barking dogs are encouraged to attend and express their opinions.