The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Dog license rates to rise to $20 a year
The price of dog licenses in Lorain County is set to rise in December.
Following a public hearing on the issue, Lorain County commissioners voted Aug. 28 to raise the price of dog license fees from $16 for a year, $48 for three years and $160 for a lifetime, to $20 a year, $60 for three years and $200 for a lifetime.
That increase will take effect Dec. 1.
The licensing fee then will increase another $2 each year until 2021.
Commissioners also voted to increase kennel fees to $100 from $70, adoption fees to $80 from $55, boarding fees to $14 from $6 and redemption fees to $71 per day from $33 a day.
Commissioner Lori Kokoski said the increases will raise an additional $114,000 a year for the kennel’s budget.
The additional funds are needed to build a new dog kennel, the commissioners said.
Lorain County Administrator James Cordes gave a history lesson on the road the county has traveled to lead to the current kennel, 301 Hadaway St. in Elyria.
“Back in 1996, we had a really, really poor facility,” he said.
At the time, the stray animals were more often euthanized.
A process that was undertaken in the kennel using an engine out of an old Chevrolet Citation which would pump the fumes into a homemade chamber, Cordes said.
“It was a terrible contraption,” he said. “So, things were pretty bad out there. The facility was just hideous.”
The county began planning a new facility in 1997. Cordes stopped working in the administration for a brief time in 1998 leaving the project in different hands.
When Cordes returned, the county had built what he describes as “half a pole barn.”
“The layout was poor and the sally port was poor and it never really functioned,” he said. “It was just hideous. Never mind trying to heat it and air condition it.”
Cordes said the commissioners and he started discussing replacing the current facility a few years ago and the need has become more pronounced as euthanization has become less common.
The county still euthanizes dogs that can’t be reintroduced into the community for various reasons, but it has not had to kill a dog due to space in about four years.
When a dog needs to be euthanized, the county employs lethal injection, Cordes said.
There still is a need for a larger, more modern facility, he said.
“This is going to be at least an 18-month process,” Cordes said. “Clearly we’re not going to expose our hand.
“We’ve already selected a site, we know where we want to be, we know the land we want to go after, we’ve discussed it.”
The budget for the kennel has hit its breaking point and even if the county loans the kennel money from the general fund, there’s no way it could repay it which is required by state law, Cordes said.
There is no plan to resell the current facility because of its condition.
Cordes estimated that the new facility will cost about $1 million with debt service at about $85,000.
Kokoski said the Lorain County dog fees are lower than the surrounding counties, and the fees charged by the kennel have been lower than the actual cost.
The actual operating cost is lower than it could be due to the large amount of donations the county receives, Cordes added.
Rail meeting sought
In other news, the commissioners received a letter Aug. 22 from Elyria City Council seeking a meeting with commissioners and Matt Dietrich, director of the Ohio Development Rail Commission, to discuss the return of passenger rail service to the city.
The commissioners have declared a project that would see passenger rail come to the county all but dead after cobbling together funding and putting out for bids.
The issue was Norfolk Southern, the company which owns the tracks in Elyria, threw up a bevy of obstacles, according to Cordes and Commissioner Matt Lundy.
The letter was not discussed in the Aug. 28 meeting.