PALMER – A Willow-area dog musher and borough mayor hopeful has again found his dog kennel on the wrong side of the law, borough officials said.

David Straub was cited last week for one count of failure to register a kennel, three counts of failure to immunize for rabies and 21 more counts for failure to register a dog, said Bob Haskell, head of Animal Care and Regulation.

To tell the whole story, Straub said Friday, you have to go back to October of 2004. That’s when his fight with the borough’s Animal Care and Regulation Department began. Twenty-eight of his dogs were seized that fall in an animal cruelty case in which the borough eventually emerged victorious. Straub has maintained from the beginning that the dogs were skinny but not starving and that when he signed them over he was doped up on painkillers he’d been prescribed for a neck injury. He’s fought the case in court, going so far as to file a lien on the borough’s animal shelter, claiming they owed him money for the dogs that were euphonized. The lien briefly delayed construction of a new facility before it was removed.

Animal Care and Regulation has had a change in leadership since then. Haskell took over in November. And, he said, as far as he’s concerned none of what happened in 2004 matters.

“There’s absolutely no reason why someone who’s been convicted in the past and has fixed the problem can’t have another opportunity,” Haskell said.

He said a month ago he got wind from someone in the mushing community that Straub was selling puppies on sleddogcentral.com. The caller asked how that could be since Straub doesn’t have a license.

Haskell said he knew Straub had applied for a license and was moving through the process. So, having heard about the puppy sales he wanted to move the paperwork along. The only thing left was to do the initial kennel inspection. Haskell told Straub all he wanted was to come out to his kennel with the borough’s veterinarian.

About then is when the process broke down.

“We actually, about a month ago, had a conversation with him by phone in which he was basically claiming that he’s got some kind of new evidence that’s going to overturn his pervious conviction,” Haskell said. “Basically he said he didn’t want to have any more dealings with the borough and was going to refuse to let us inspect his kennel.”

Straub said that’s true, though he feels he was just protecting his dogs. He said he told Haskell he wanted his own veterinarian to do the inspection

“I want to have my veterinarian here and I want somebody to videotape it,” he recalls telling Haskell. “I’m not taking another chance of losing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of my animals.”

That’s not how Haskell tells it. He doesn’t recall any talk of having Straub bring his own vet.

“No, that was not discussed and even if it had been discussed, it wasn’t a possibility,” he said. The borough is charged with inspections and therefore has to have its own veterinarian conduct them.

There was another issue out there — that of fines Straub owes from his previous convictions. Haskell said he was more than willing to work out a payment plan with Straub and that the $1,900 in outstanding fines shouldn’t have been an obstacle.

Straub gets emotional talking about this point. He feels he doesn’t owe the borough anything. He sees it as the borough asking him to pay for the euphonizing of his dogs.

“They took 20 minutes to put my dogs down and now they want to extort money from me? I think I paid my debt to the Mat Valley,” Straub said, through tears.

In more concrete terms, he said, his dogs were worth $5.4 million. So if the borough wants their $1,900 he’ll just subtract it from their debt to him.

Straub said he thinks the timing of the citations is suspect, given that he’s running for mayor. Indeed, the day they came to give him his tickets he was at a candidates’ forum in Wasilla. Though he tries not to dwell on it in candidates’ forum, his run, he said, is partially attributable to his fight with the shelter.

“That’s why I want to go down there to the borough, because if it’s happening to dog people it’s happening to timber people and gravel people,” he said.

Haskell said politics had nothing to do with it. It didn’t come up in his department’s discussions about the case. He had no idea Straub was at a candidates’ forum the day he sent an officer to deliver the citations. And anyway, it’s a moot point because had they taken Straub’s candidacy into account they would have done the same thing.

“We’ve been trying to work with him. He’s violated the law and I think we would be doing injustice to the public if we actually sat down and thought, ‘Well, gee maybe we should wait until after the election is over.’ What would make him different from any member of the community?”

Whatever the case, Straub said he intends to fight the citations in court. And he intends to make another run at overturning his conviction in 2004. He said his fight has been tougher than running the Iditarod and every new installment tears off scabs.

“I’m willing to re-open these wounds,” he said. “One of these days old Davie boy is going to have somebody stand up for him and his dogs and have somebody stand up and say what you did to him and his dogs is wrong.”

For Haskell’s part, he said the department hasn’t decided on what the next step will be. There are a number of options out there. He conceded that seizing the dogs is one option the borough has but he said a decision hasn’t been made which way things will go.

“As far as future actions, we’re a step at a time here and it starts with a citation,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.