Vermilion County will be proceeding with a $16-thousand-800-dollar Needs Assessment Study to review conditions at the County Animal Shelter. Kasey Snyder, Director of the Vermilion County Department of Animal Regulations, says the shelter has numerous problems….
{AUDIO: ”Our ceilings are coming down. The walls are molded up behind the material. We’ve got things coming down – falling off the walls all the time. Things are rusting out. We haven’t had air-conditioning since the beginning of the spring – which made for a very long summer. We’ve got water issues (and) we’ve got bigger ventilation issues as well.”}
The Property Committee of the County Board heard about the problems at a meeting last evening (Monday, October 23, 2023). The committee informally agreed to use federal ARPA funds to hire a professional consulting firm to look at the county’s animal shelter….
{AUDIO: ”The first step with them is for them to come in and assess our current facility. See, can we salvage this – and, if so, how? If they don’t feel that we can – well, even if they do feel we can – they’re also going to give us a proposal for a new facility as well.”}
If the County agrees to proceed to the second – or conceptual design phase – it would cost an additional $22-thousand-500 dollars. And then if the County proceeded to step three it would involve the construction of an entirely new animal shelter. The cost of step three is currently unknown, but committee members were told there is plenty of room to construct a new shelter on land where the current shelter is located. The current shelter is 11-thousand square feet and it sits on a 277-thousand square foot site that is owned by the county
