Six years ago, the Baltimore city animal shelter was, by all accounts, a nightmare. A tiny staff of city employees with no particular interest in animals manned the place. Funding was extremely tight. Underfed, sick, and wounded animals lay on unsealed concrete floors soaked with urine, mostly waiting to die. The shelter had a 98 percent euthanasia rate. Cindy Wright, then an investigative reporter and producer for WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., did a story on the shelter in 2000. “It was the most inhumane, disgusting thing I’ve probably witnessed in 30 years,” she says. “And I covered the war in Kosovo. I’ve done stories around the world, looking at the worst of humanity.”

Local animal welfare groups lobbied the city to turn the shelter into a quasi-public nonprofit. Freed of city hiring and firing constraints, a nonprofit would be allowed to bring in volunteers—and, most importantly, to fundraise. In 2005, after months of negotiation, Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter (BARCS) came into existence. Six years later, the euthanasia rate has dropped to 38 percent. The staff, at first comprised of just 10 people, has increased to 42. The shelter has its own surgical facilities, two part-time veterinarians, two outdoor dog runs, and partnerships with other rescues and private shelters. It is, indisputably, a better place for animals.

But over the last year or so, a group of critics—volunteers and former members of the BARCS board of directors—has begun to speak up. They say that although the shelter is much improved, it is also deeply flawed, with problems ranging from animal neglect to overcrowding to lack of accountability. They say that because of the dire state of the city shelter in the past, BARCS has become a sacred cow. “They need to move beyond, ‘Five or six years ago it was like this,’” says Kris Northrup, until recently a BARCS volunteer. (Disclosure: Northrup is married to Michael Northrup, a freelance photographer for City Paper.) “They keep pointing at the same tired thing. And it’s like, it’s time for you guys to move a step beyond that.”

Jennifer Mead-Brause, BARCS’ executive director, says these detractors are misguided and misinformed. “This small group of people,” she says, “formed to really try to hurt BARCS.” She says the group, particularly two former board members—Michael Franks and Jennifer LaPorte—has been trying to “hurt us, hurt our board, hurt everybody” since last fall. In December 2010, a group of volunteers sent a letter to the BARCS board voicing numerous concerns, including unsanitary conditions, insufficient exercise and human contact for the animals, inadequate cage size, and improper adoption standards, among other perceived problems. The board met with the volunteers in January and sent a response letter in March. In it, the board disagreed that many of the problems cited by the volunteers existed. The board acknowledged that improvements could be made in certain areas but the shelter was constrained, it noted, due to lack of funds. “We believe any objective observer would quickly understand that BARCS is significantly underfunded,” the letter read. “The lack of necessary economic support should not be an excuse for deficiencies which may occur from time to time at the Shelter, but should be recognized as imposing limitations on what can be immediately accomplished.”

BARCS’ critics say those limitations are largely self-imposed. They allege that the nonprofit is not doing nearly enough to raise money, the very function it was created to perform, and as a result conditions for the animals are wanting. Marjie Amyot, one of BARCS’ first official volunteers and a long-time supporter, was one of many who saw great promise early on. “BARCS was going up, up, up and had potential to really become this amazing model place,” she says. But years passed and some early supporters, including Amyot, have become disappointed in BARCS’ performance. “I felt like what was a can-do attitude became a we-can’t-do-that attitude,” Amyot says. The question now for the animal lovers and taxpayers of Baltimore—who, in large part, fund BARCS—is whether the shelter is a case of arrested development or a well-meaning public-private partnership tackling difficult problems in a city with more than its share of them.

BARCS is inundated with animals—no one disputes that. Because of its contract with the city, the shelter is required to be open-admission. It must accept every animal that comes through its doors, including nearly all the neglect and abuse cases and the thousands of strays picked up annually by city Animal Control. “They don’t have the luxury of turning away the 18-year-old incontinent cat that’s brought into their door,” says Caroline Griffin, who chairs the Mayor’s Anti-Animal Abuse Advisory Commission. Griffin praises the management of the shelter, and points to the high volume of animals as an explanation for any problems that may exist. BARCS takes in almost 12,000 animals a year. “Most animal shelters in the Baltimore region will take in anywhere from three to 10 animals a day,” she says. “BARCS takes in, on average, 33 animals.”

Quasi-public shelters like BARCS are common, says Kate Pullen, senior director for community outreach at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), an organization that provides resources to shelters nationwide. And they share a common set of difficulties. “The whole point of entering into a contractual situation is that you do make yourself more available to nonprofit grants and tax credits for donations from the public,” Pullen says. “But you’re still mired under the fact that you’re providing animal control, and you have a shelter with predominantly bully breed, hard-to-place types of animals”—pitbulls and pitbull mixes.

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