SCARBOROUGH – The pack of dog lovers at Wednesday’s Town Council meeting in Scarborough was far smaller than in the recent past, but was no less vocal as they howled over the creation of a new Animal Control Advisory Committee.

The seven-person committee, established by a 5-1 vote – with Councilor Kate St. Clair opposed – has until Jan. 21 to provide the council with a list of actions it may take to keep dogs sequestered from the piping plover, an endangered shorebird protected by the Endangered Species Act.

However, members of the advocacy group Dog Owners of Greater Scarborough (DOGS) objected to the short deadline, as well as to the fact that Town Manager Tom Hall recruited members outside of an open application process.

“Lots of folks are really ticked off that the council is going to appoint the people tonight,” wrote former Town Councilor Suzanne Foley-Ferguson, a leading voice of the DOGS group, in an email sent Wednesday in the hours between Hall’s unveiling of committee-member names to the press and the council meeting at which they were to be appointed.

However, Hall said he had to work in haste because any ordinance updates spinning out of committee recommendation need to be in place by April 1 in order to meet guidelines set by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to avoid a $12,000 federal fine, levied after a plover was killed on Pine Point Beach last summer. The Jan. 21 deadline for committee action is designed to give the town time enough to shepherd any new ordinance language through the public hearing and Planning Board review process before the start of the plover nesting season in April.

Although time is short, the committee also has a wider charge to address a host of canine control issues raised over the last several months during the sometimes contentious debate waged between town councilors and DOGS members. The timeline of that tete-a-tete traces from the July 15 plover death, to the Aug. 20 issuance of a Fish and Wildlife letter that claimed the town “did knowingly cause” the death because its leash law allows dogs to run free on the beach from sunrise to 9 a.m. during the late spring and summer. Fish and Wildlife issued a notice of violation of the Endangered Species Act, which assessed the fine, on Sept. 11.

That launched a negotiating period between Hall and the feds, which culminated in an agreement that lowered the fine to $500 in exchange for a host of concessions, including a promise to adopt a new leash law mandating that dogs be kept on leashes no longer than 8 feet when on municipal beaches between April 1 and Aug. 30.

However, at the Oct. 2 meeting, during which the council endorsed that agreement, the council went far beyond the minimum requirements, instead extending the leash law to all public property, year-round. Council Chairman Richard Sullivan has said that action was as much to mollify a “silent minority” of residents who seized on the debate to demand the stronger leash law as it was to pacify the feds on plover protection.

DOGS members sprang into action and launched a petition drive to overturn the controversial leash law. On Dec. 3, in a near-record turnout for a special election in Scarborough, voters rejected the leash law by a 73-percent margin, automatically resetting it to the previous version, which allowed for limited free run. In response, and with the threat of the $12,000 fine once again hanging over the town’s collective head, Sullivan convened a special workshop session, at which the council charged Hall with creating an ad hoc citizen’s committee to decide next steps.

Sullivan and several of his council-mates said the referendum vote was an indication only that they went too far in trying to extend the leash law town-wide.

“If it has just been about the plovers, it would have passed,” said Sullivan.

However, many DOGS members took the vote as an endorsement of the status quo and accused the council, in its seeming rush to create a committee and charge it with determining how best to save plover chicks from future dog maulings, with trying to overturn the will of the people.

“The fact that the council is now seeking to reject the will of 73 percent of the voters is, to me, beyond bad politics,” said Lucky Lane resident Amy Derienzo. “I personally feel this is a mockery of our political system.”

“The 26 percent, they are entitled to have their voice heard, but they are not entitled to run over the 73 percent,” said Robert Rovner, of King Street. “Anywhere else in this world, 73 percent is called a landslide. In this town, it’s called ‘We don’t care.’ ”

In a Dec. 11 letter signed by DOGS president Katy Foley, the PAC’s steering committee stumped for committee membership that mirrored the Dec. 3 vote, with a 3-to-1 margin sympathetic to their cause and no town councilors called to sit as voting members. The group also said non-resident beach users should be represented on the committee, which it advised ought to include 12 members. And, while it agreed a decision on how, or if, to meet the Fish and Wildlife guideline on leash laws should be top priority, it said all other animal control issues related to dogs and plovers in Scarborough should not be subject to a deadline, with the committee allowed to deliberate for “as long as it takes.” The committee should consider each beach separately, it said, rather than try to craft one blanket ordinance to cover them all.

Instead, what DOGS got out of Hall’s recruitment drive was just three seats on the committee given to Foley, local dentist and DOGS founder Daniel Ravin, and Pine Point resident Margot Hodgkins, who played a sizable role in the petition drive that overturned the leash law.

The other committee members, unanimously approved by the council, are University of New England professor and wildlife biologist Noah Perlut, Higgins Beach resident Glennis Chabot, who teaches biology at South Portland High School and is a longtime volunteer coordinator of plover enthusiasts, and Lucy Lacasse, plover advocate for the Prouts Neck Country Club on Western Beach.

Also named to the committee was newly elected Councilor Bill Donovan.

Although the DOGS group got nowhere on the appointments, some councilors were openly sympathetic to the deadline concern, with Councilor Kate St. Clair moving to push it back to Feb. 19.

“I’m hung up on the date, it’s a problem for me,” she said. “I think we are asking for an enormous amount of info in a short amount of time.”

“Anyone who has done truly collaborative work knows it takes time,” said Foley, arguing for an open-ended charge to the committee. “I don’t think it can get done by Jan. 21. It will take one full meeting just to get to know each other.”

Councilors Jessica Holbrook and Jean-Marie Caterina agreed, but with Sullivan absent and Councilors Donovan, Jim Benedict and Ed Blaise favoring the earlier date, St. Clair’s motion failed in a 3-3 tie.

“The way I look at it, a date is a date,” said Blaise. “Just because we are going to vote on this thing, it doesn’t mean all hell is going to break loose if we don’t get a recommendation by Jan. 21.”

Blaise suggested the council could well extend the committee’s charge past January in order for it to fully vet a more complete range of options relating to plovers and dogs in town. Still, Donovan said he was certain that satisfying the feds, at the least, could be done by Jan. 21.

“I expect the committee will be impressive in the speed with which it works and the level of the discussion,” he said. “This is a really stellar committee, and I think we are going to do a really good job on behalf of the town. The town should appreciate how hard Tom Hall worked on this. He was tireless.”

Hall said each person being solicited to sit on the committee was a first-round draft pick.

“I didn’t get any no’s, but that’s because I was very deliberate in my approach,” he said, after Wednesday’s meeting. “Let’s face it, this task is not for the faint of heart. It’s going to take a significant investment of time. But each of these people will come to the table well-versed in the issues at hand.”

Even so, not everyone was on board with the selection process, or its charge. Foley-Ferguson, in particular, suggested the committee was a straw man stacked against dog lovers and designed only to rob them of the few hours per day of free run now allowed between April 15 and Sept. 15. She paraphrased conversations she claimed to have had with “at least four” councilors, whom she said are more worried about the federal fine than the continued wrath of dog owners. Blaise, at least, seemed to bear that out.

“I’m not going to sit here and fight the government. OK? I’m sorry about that,” he said.

“If you can pull the committee to a predetermined end point of leashing dogs in the early morning without evaluating other threats against the plovers, then you are being disingenuous,” said Foley-Ferguson. “And if you force the committee to get its work done in two weeks, given the three holidays between now and then, then you are repeating a process we said no to, and you are not representing us.”

“This does not pass the straight face test,” agreed former state Rep. Sean Flaherty, of Pine Point Road. “This cannot get solved in one meeting or two meetings, in one month or two months. This needs public input. This advisory committee, just on its face, doesn’t seem to be about what the issue really is. We do not know what the repercussions will be if we do not act before April 1.”

“It’s not hard to understand the word ‘No,’ ” said King Street resident Pammela Rovner. “It’s an ‘N’ and an ‘O.’ The recent referendum resoundingly rejected this council’s response to the threat of a fine. We said ‘No,’ and we meant it. We are asking you to respect that.”

Despite the barrage of criticism, Hall stood firm in his selections.

“My goal in all of this was to come up with folks who are willing to put the time in and who had proven themselves already, or else had proven themselves in past processes,” said Hall. “These are people who are open-minded and willing to do good work to better the town. With a great degree on confidence I recommend these folks. I don’t believe this is a charade whatsoever.”

A first meeting for the ad hoc animal control committee has been set for Thursday, Dec. 26. Foley said she has canceled a planned holiday trip in order to attend.

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