Quinte Humane Society looking for funding for new shelter

By Liam Radford

BELLEVILLE – The Quinte Humane Society is asking Belleville city council for $1 million to help build a new animal shelter.

At Monday’s council meeting, Frank Rockett and Donna Endicott from the humane society asked the city to help them build a replacement for the aging shelter on Avonlough Rd.

Council referred the request to its budget discussions for 2019, when a decision will be made.

Endicott said during the presentation that the existing building is unsuitable for the society’s needs.

“You may have noticed that the sign outside the building says ‘A nice place to wait for a forever home.’ This is no longer the case,” she told the councillors.

Rockett, the executive director, told QNet News this week the society has been in the building since the 1970s. It lacks many of the society’s basic requirements, he said.

“The building was never really meant to be an animal shelter. It’s reached the end of its usable life.”

The society has bought six acres of land for a new building on Wallbridge-Loyalist Road, Rockett said. The planned new building will resolve many of the society’s current problems, which include overcrowding. It will have enough space for the animals – which sometimes number more than 200 – and will have proper ventilation to help improve the health of the animals and staff. It will also have outside areas for dogs and a more homelike environment for cats, to help reduce their stress.

“Stress really does seem to trigger medical responses or conditions within the animals,” he said.

The estimated $10 million price tag for construction of the new building is partly a result of the way in which it needs to be built, Rockett said. It design need to allow the animal areas to be cleaned thoroughly many times a day, and the building needs to last for the next 50 years, he said.

The society has been planning the building for the last three years, working with experts to plan the new shelter.

It has received over $1.5 million from donors so far.

Now the challenge for the society is to get the rest of the money. Rockett said grant requests were made to the provincial and federal governments, but they will not be approved unless some funding comes from the municipal level.

In addition to the request for $1 million from Belleville, the society will ask Quinte West and Prince Edward County for a combined $500,000.

This is the first time the humane society has asked for funding from the city, Rockett said.