Dog court — formally a bite and vicious animal hearing process — adjudicates cases involving dogs that have attacked people or other animals. The city uses the proceedings to impose conditions on owners or, in serious cases, order an animal removed. Its absence over the past year left animal control officers and bite victims with fewer formal options for resolving dangerous-animal complaints.

The program's collapse traced back to a funding fight rather than any policy decision to end it. How the new position will be funded, and at what salary, has not been publicly detailed by the city.

The animal control and code enforcement functions that feed cases into dog court sit within the Department of Animal Care and Control. The agency has not announced a timeline for when hearings will resume or how the backlog of pending cases, if any, will be handled.

What to watch: Whether the city posts the hearing officer job publicly and when it expects the first hearings to be scheduled. Animal Care and Control's next budget hearing will offer a clearer picture of whether the program has stable long-term funding or is once again relying on a one-time fix.