Shelter Director Debbie Dobbs and a couple of Animal Control Board members met with Johnson City and Washington County Commissioners at Thursday’s City/County Liaison Committee meeting to discuss why the shelter needs to relocate and get feedback from the commissioners.
A new facility can come later, but the focus now is on finding suitable property for a new shelter, Dobbs said.
Dobbs said she would like to have at least 3 acres of property for a new shelter that would be centrally located between Johnson City and Washington County. She said with this acreage, larger animals such as horses could be kept at the shelter rather than the county farm.
Dobbs said the shelter’s current property has been previously expanded upon and is at its maximum. While $165,000 has been saved for the construction of a new shelter facility, Dobbs said centrally located property would be too expensive to purchase.
“We’re trying to work on a central location to where we can get to the county residents at a good rate timewise for emergencies, and the same with the city,” she said. “We don’t want to leave anybody in a lurch where we can’t get to them on time when there’s an emergency.”
Aside from having no room for further expansion, the city has future plans for the property on which the shelter currently sits, Dobbs said. Since it was constructed in 1986, she said more than 143,000 animals have came through the shelter.
It is also felt a larger facility would cut down on the number of animals euthanized. Dobbs said an average of between 60 to 80 animals are euthanized weekly during winter months, and around 250 to 300 are euthanized each week during the summer.
“It’s a staggering amount,” she said. “Out of those 143,000 animals, we put to sleep 100,000 of them since 1986 when that shelter was built.”
Dobbs said that by having the space to keep adoptable animals longer, the odds of adoption greatly increase. She also said continued city and county population growth will obviously equate to a higher number of animals.
“I feel that with our growing communities, city and county, we need to be bigger,” she said.
Currently, the shelter has 82 total kennels, with 20 indoor/outdoor kennels and four isolation kennels for unadoptable animals. Ideally, Dobbs said she would like to see that increase to 50 indoor/outdoor kennels, and the outdoor kennels at the current shelter could be moved to a new one.
The shelter is now around 4,000 square feet, and Dobbs said she would like to see a shelter of 8,000 to 10,000 square feet constructed on property that would lend itself to possible future expansion.
“We didn’t think we were going to need a new facility at the time we built it because it was about three times as big as anything we had before” said Animal Control Board member Rick Gordon. “It’s kind of changed over the years.”
Based off of a 2003 estimate Dobbs received from a construction company, the cost of a new shelter would be around $500,000.
Johnson City Manager Pete Peterson presented the idea of using city-owned property located near Wetlands Water Park in Jonesborough for a new shelter site. The site suggested is a portion of the old Washington County landfill, he said. It was agreed that this site would be looked into further.
Johnson City Vice Mayor Jeff Banyas said he would like to see something occur regarding new animal shelter property within the next six months. Relocation of the shelter has been explored in the past, and Dobbs said the matter is urgent.
“This has been going up and down for 12 years,” she said.