Dogs in the care of Boone County Animal Care & Control marched to their new home at the new Boone County Animal Shelter Monday morning in a PAWrade from the shelter’s current location to its new location on Idlewild Road in Burlington.
“The hope is that it is a more usable space for both our animals and our public,” said Shelter Director Colleen Bray.
Although the new shelter won’t be open to the public until March 16, it will serve as the primary site, at least for the dogs, beginning this week to help the animals get acclimated before people start coming in. There are currently about 10 dogs and two cats in the care of the county, but the shelter will be able to hold up to 30 dogs, 30 cats and a handful of small animals–hamsters, guinea pigs and the like–once it’s up and running. Bray said the county will care for as many as 2,000 animals over the course of a given year.
The current shelter was built in the 1970s and isn’t up to modern standards, especially regarding the county’s current no-kill policy.
“It was really designed to house animals for a much shorter period of time, and that’s not the case anymore,” said Boone County Communication Senior Manager Elaine Zeinner.
The project has its roots in a feasibility study from the early 2000s, Zeinner said, which helped identify the shortcomings in the current shelter’s design. Although the new shelter has roughly the same capacity as the current shelter, changes to the building’s layout and various quality-of-life improvements will make it a better place for the animals.
For one thing, the dogs and the cats in the new shelter will be separated to reduce stress for the animals. The dog kennels in the new shelter have doors leading to fenced-in outdoor pens so the animals can go outside when they want. The cat rooms, on the other hand, will have ledges and other climbable surfaces for the cats to interact with. Even though the individual cat rooms don’t lead outside, there will be a CATio, as it’s called, which is a cordoned-off outdoor area where the cats can play and socialize in the sun. The shelter will also feature expanded administrative offices, where animal control officers will work, a classroom and a more welcoming front-end.
The quality-of-life improvements are all well and good, but the staff and county officials at the event were more excited about the new shelter’s expanded medical capacity. This included separated, sealed ventilation systems, which are better at mitigating disease outbreaks than the current shelter’s connected vent system, dedicated surgical and recovery rooms and specialized, antimicrobial floors.
Finally, the shelter will also house a low-cost spay and neuter facility, the first of its kind in the Northern Kentucky region, which will be independently funded (i.e. not with tax dollars) and operated by a nonprofit provider. The county has not yet landed on an agency, although they’ve identified three in Cincinnati that provide such services.
“We want to make sure our staff and our team have the tools necessary,” said Boone County Judge/Executive Gary Moore. “That’s capacity, but it’s also things like the customer service side of things… When somebody is dropping off an animal, that’s very emotional. Sometimes it’s the person bringing them in, but it’s also when staff has picked up an animal out of the community… So the customer service portion of this building will be much better designed to be able to separate those two functions of a shelter.”
The project’s overall cost was about $8 million, said Boone County Administrator Matthew Webster, $5 million of which came from the fiscal court and the remaining $3 million of which came from a capital fundraising campaign. In October, inflationary costs and unexpected infrastructural expenses caused the project to exceed its initial budget by about $280,000.
“This is comprised of some field issues that must be remediated, some inflationary costs related to our owner-provided equipment and a recommended change in scope for security access control,” Webster said in October.
On Monday, however, Webster and Zeinner confirmed that private donations had successfully offset those extra costs in the interim.
In October, it was announced that the cost of the Boone County animal shelter construction project would exceed budget by approximately $280,000 due to field issues, inflationary costs, and a recommended change in scope for security access control. The change orders were approved by the Boone County Fiscal Court, and the county is continuing its fundraising efforts to raise the $128,000 difference. The project is expected to be fully functioning in the new facility no later than March 1.
Boone County animal shelter project over budget by $280k
“We’ve seen folks give $20, if that’s what they could give, up to a million dollars for naming rights on the facilities,” Webster said. “So it’s a really interesting combination of a public-private partnership that has allowed us to do a lot of things in the shelter we probably wouldn’t have done if it was purely a taxpayer-funded municipal shelter.”
Boone County Administrator Matthew Webster shows off the cat wing of the new shelter. Photo by Nathan Granger | LINK nky
The Joanie Bernard Foundation, a Cincinnati-based foundation specializing in service for cats, also contributed $1 million to construct the spay and neuter clinic.
“Probably of all the projects that I worked on in 10 years at the county, this is the one where I’m not sure we’ve received one negative [comment],” Webster went on to say.
“This has been a really exciting journey,” Webster said near the end of the event. “It’s been an exciting day to bring our animals from the current shelter to the new shelter.”
Check out a slideshow of the PAWrade and the new shelter facilities below. To learn more about the services offered at Boone County’s Animal Shelter, as well as information on how you can support the shelter, visit their website.
