“Board members, you should have received an email with the minutes attached from our November 1st, 2023 meeting,” presiding officer Cynthia Rothermel said.
It was roughly a third of the way into the Licensed Breeder Advisory Board’s meeting on Wednesday morning, and the sentence is the whole story. The minutes a board approves at the top of its agenda are the minutes of the last time it met. For this board, according to the agendas posted to the website, that was November 1, 2023 — two years, nine months and four days earlier.
The board is the state’s only standing advisory body on the licensing and inspection of commercial dog and cat breeders. It exists under the Dog and Cat Breeders Act to advise the Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation on program administration, licensing standards and fees. During the two years and nine months it did not convene, the agency it advises kept inspecting kennels, kept opening complaints, and kept closing them.
What Wednesday’s meeting reveals is what happens to a body left that long on the shelf.
It reconvened with eight of its nine seats filled, and a membership that had turned over. Two members were introduced as newly appointed and asked to say who they were. Kellye Marshall of Nacogdoches — the board’s licensed-breeder representative, who breeds Australian Shepherds and Mini American Shepherds — said she had spent thirty-one years as an agriculture educator before breeding. Danielle Kessler, who goes by Danny, is the animal control supervisor for the City of Round Rock and worked in the Travis County Jail before that.
A ninth seat — the board’s second licensed-breeder seat — is simply empty, and the meeting turned briefly into a recruiting appeal for it. “We have a licensed breeder position open,” said one member “So, if you know anyone Yes, if you know anyone, tell them to submit their application.”
The board does its substantive work through four work groups: enforcement, licensing, rules and compliance. When the coordinator put the roster on screen, seven of the seats across those four groups were vacant. Two on enforcement. Two on licensing. One on rules. Two on compliance.
All seven were filled from the floor in a few minutes — some by volunteers, some by direct solicitation from the chair and the coordinator, and in several cases by the same handful of people saying yes again. Laura Donahue and Danny Kessler took enforcement. Kellye Marshall and Kessler took licensing. Marshall took rules. The presiding officer and Vanessa Gagne took compliance. Marshall, a new member whose term runs to 2032, took two of them on her first day, and Kessler took two more. “That’s great,” Marshall said. “I don’t mind serving on any of them.”
Before any of that, the board spent roughly the first third of its meeting receiving the annual open-government training from an assistant general counsel — the Open Meetings Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, the Public Information Act. Members were walked at length through the hazard of the walking quorum, the practice of a board doing business in pieces outside a properly noticed public meeting. “Beware of the walking quorum,” counsel said, and set out the penalties: a fine of $100 to $500, one to six months in county jail, or both.
The training took longer than every piece of business the board actually transacted, combined.
Because there was no business. Approving the 2023 minutes was the meeting’s only vote, taken by roll call, six ayes. No public comment was submitted — “We did not receive any public comments for today’s meeting.” No rule was proposed, recommended or reviewed. No recommendation went to the commission. The board received five staff reports and set no date for its next meeting: “The date and time of that next meeting will be discussed at a later date.”
The staff reports are where the substance sat, and nobody asked a question about any of them.
A senior prosecutor from the Enforcement Division delivered the one finding with teeth: “The number of complaints has increased, but the percentage of complaints resulting in disciplinary action has decreased.” Most complaints in the breeder program come from consumers. Every breeder case closed with an order was closed by agreed order with an administrative penalty; the rest were closed for insufficient evidence or with a warning letter. And the single most common allegation, at both the opening and the closing of a case, is that someone is breeding without a license at all — one of the two cases she highlighted was an unlicensed breeder, the other a breeder operating on an expired license.
Nobody asked how many. Nobody asked why the disciplinary rate is falling while complaints rise.
From Field Inspections, the South Region manager reported 131 licensed-breeder inspections so far in fiscal 2026 against 119 at the same point in 2025, on an eighteen-month inspection cycle. The top violation in fiscal 2025 was the annual animal inventory not being filed by February 1. The top violation in fiscal 2026 is the same one. “It seems to be a recurring violation,” he said. The second most common in 2026, nine citations, was housing that cannot be cleaned and sanitized.
The longest stretch of the meeting after the training belonged to the deputy executive director, Steve Bruno, who came with two agency-wide items: TDLR Core, a three-year-plus, wave-by-wave replacement of the licensing systems the department has inherited through decades of program transfers — “I don’t have an estimate yet” — and a reminder that the Legislature convenes in January.
That last item drew the meeting’s only real exchange, and it was about the board’s own reach. A member asked to discuss the American Kennel Club’s posture in Texas going into the session. Another member immediately turned to Bruno to ask whether that was even permissible, since the AKC is not on the board — “As they are not a sitting board member, would that be a public comment request[?]” His answer amounted to: that relationship is not ours to have. “We don’t have a formal relationship with those associations,” he said, and suggested members invite them to give public comment, or engage with them privately as individuals.
He was equally careful about the agency’s own footprint. “I am cautious for folks when we list those bills to think that’s a TDLR bill,” he said. “We don’t advocate.” He recalled being TDLR’s government relations officer when the breeder legislation was moving: “I wasn’t going around saying, ‘This is something you should do or you should not do.’ We were answering questions.”
Two members asked for the same thing on the way out, from opposite directions, and both requests are artifacts of the gap. One asked for a session on artificial intelligence and how it might create efficiencies for the program. The other asked for something more basic: a retrospective on the last four or five years, so the new members could be caught up. “We have some new members that weren’t a part of the original implementation of whatever the… breeder limit law was passed,” she said. “So, I think it might be helpful to kind of get everybody on the same page.”
The presiding officer had already said of the retrospective request: “I think that is extremely valuable.”
Then counsel added one more thing, almost as an aside, and it is the closest the meeting came to naming what the last three years cost. Rules work on this program, she said, has been under way and “a lot of that predated my time on this program” — it will be “a coming attraction” for the work groups.
Work groups that, until Wednesday morning, were seven seats short.
“There’s no further business, this meeting of the Licensed Breeder Advisory Board is adjourned,” the presiding officer said. “Thank you all for your contributions and your attendance. The time is 10:53.”
Fifty-one minutes, after thirty-three months.
The meeting at a glance
Issue
The Licensed Breeder Advisory Board — the state’s only standing advisory body on the regulation of commercial dog and cat breeders — reconvened after an interval of two years, nine months and four days.
What happened
The board approved the minutes of its November 1, 2023 meeting on a six-vote roll call, its only vote. It received the annual open-government training, five staff reports and an agency update.
What staff reported
Complaints in the breeder program are up and the share resulting in disciplinary action is down; the most common allegation at both case opening and case closing is unlicensed breeding. Field inspections: 131 year to date in fiscal 2026 against 119 in fiscal 2025, on an eighteen-month cycle. The top inspection violation two years running is failure to file the annual animal inventory by February 1.
When
Wednesday, August 5, 2026, 10:02 a.m. to 10:53 a.m. CT — 51 minutes. Held by videoconference.
Governing body
Licensed Breeder Advisory Board, Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Presiding Officer Cynthia Rothermel (San Antonio). Members Valeri Devaney (Sugarland); Laura Donahue (Austin); Vanessa Kerbi Gagne (Lewisville); Danielle Kessler (Round Rock); Kellye Marshall (Nacogdoches); Erin Shults (Carrollton); Christena Stephens (Brownfield); one seat vacant. The board advises the Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation, which holds the rulemaking power; the board itself adopts nothing.
Archived video
“August 5th, 2026 – Licensed Breeders Advisory Board meeting”, TexasLicensing channel