SHELTER CONCERNS OUTWEIGHED QUESTIONS
With little more than two weeks between the first public mention and Wednesday’s approval, the Humane Educational Society (HES) has funding for a new animal shelter.
No one who has set foot in the current shelter — which has been doing the best it can with the facility it has — would fail to understand why a new shelter is needed. Cages lined up next to each other in an ancient building once used as a children’s home. Odors no human or animal should be forced to smell for long periods of time. Sad eyes looking out from cages, pleading with someone — anyone — to take them home and out of such an existence.
And when the Hamilton County Commission prepared to vote on the resolution to provide up to $10 million for a new shelter, no one did fail to understand. Although the official vote in favor of the resolution was 8-1, even the commissioner who was recorded as opposing it — Tim Boyd, who actually passed on the measure — said he was fully aware of the need.
Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger said at Wednesday’s commission meeting a new home for HES was discussed as far back as when he first came to the commission, in 2006.
In the interim, McKamey Animal Center was built to serve the city of Chattanooga, and HES was designated as a shelter for unincorporated Hamilton County and most of its municipalities. A decade later, HES remained in its dilapidated facilities — where it had been for 118 years — on North Highland Park Avenue.
The fulcrum that prompted the resolution to fund the facility, according to Coppinger, was money in a capital projects fund created when the commission approved a property tax hike on Sept. 6, 2017. Extra money existed in the fund because of the time that elapsed between the time the county issued bonds in March and when the projects funded by the tax increase first required debt service payments.
The proposed 36,000-square-foot facility is expected to be built on 6.8 acres near the intersection of Bonny Oaks Drive and Highway 153, a much more centralized location within the county than its current site.
Boyd and other commissioners had questions last week when the resolution was initially discussed and again Wednesday. Boyd wondered, among other things, if an environmental study was done on the proposed property, if it was risky to put $10 million in the hands of a nonprofit (HES), and if there weren’t other projects that had gone unfunded for too long. He said he didn’t appreciate how the resolution seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Commissioner Chip Baker said he thought about whether it made sense to delay the measure to consider talks with McKamey Animal Center about combining the two shelters, if commissioners first should see schematic renderings of the proposed facility and, generally, if building a new HES was a “sound business decision.”
Warren Mackey had questions last week about putting HES needs over human needs. And Greg Martin asked HES Executive Director Bob Citrullo Wednesday whether the new facilities would alleviate the need to operate the shelter in a fiscally efficient way.
In the end, the ongoing state of the shelter and Coppinger’s promise that no new money was being requested carried the day.
The shelter vote didn’t end the ongoing feud between Boyd and the county mayor, who chirped at each other after most of the red-shirted HES supporters left the room.
Coppinger, without referencing the commissioner, said comments questioning the resolution and its timing were “hurtful,” “hurtful to government” and “needless.” He also mentioned sizable donors, how “things come in confidence” and the intentionally fiscally sound “way we’ve run county government.”
He also said just getting the two nonprofits — which contract to serve the public — to merge wasn’t as easy as one might think. “They answer to boards,” he said. “You can’t just put them together. It doesn’t work that way.”
Boyd, in turn, called the expenditure “unprecedented” and “bad government” and said it seems to be “administration policy to shield things from this commission.”
He later repeated his concern that no commission discussion had occurred on how such extra money in the capital projects fund might otherwise be used and how the potential existence of the money that will be spent on the HES facility was hidden “in a footnote.”
We are weary of the ongoing spat between two conservative public officials who believe their approach to the use of county money, and the transparency thereof, is the correct approach. But we believe most Hamilton County residents will appreciate the plans for a new shelter that can proudly wear the name “humane.”