Committee has concerns
Animal Care Advisory wants to be listened to
County Commissioner Steven Verran talks to Annette Prewitt at an Animal Care Advisory Committee meeting. (photo:Ben Pounds )
The committee met last Thursday (Oct. 5) and unanimously voted to bring its motions to the Anderson County Operations Committee’s meeting. The Operations Committee met Monday.
County Commissioner Tracy Wandell, who is a co-chair of the Animal Care Advisory Committee, said Anderson County Mayor Terry Frank had not addressed motions the board had brought to her, and he wanted to get a better response.
The motions going to the Operations Committee involve the Anderson County Animal Shelter’s process, operations, funding and care of animals.
“I like fixing things; I like addressing things. I’m not sure that I’ve helped,” Wandell said regarding his time on the Animal Care Advisory Committee. “I’m not interested in pat-me-on-the-head move-it-down-the-line.
“We’ve got motions. We don’t have a whole lot more,” he told the committee regarding its accomplishments.
Wandell told The Courier News that too much of the shelter budget goes to salaries of employees and too little to animal maintenance.
“We’re talking medicine, food,” he said. “That’s not a lot. That’s not enough for everything.”
Motions the committee has made included to have a full-time shelter coordinator to coordinate with rescue shelters, to create a volunteer liaison to transport dogs and cats to outside facilities, and to create a foster program within the shelter to develop policies and procedures.
Meanwhile the nonprofit Shelter Animals Rescue Group has helped fix the fencing of the shelter’s kennels. Vada Oberlin, chairwoman of group’s board said it used its own funds rather than county funds for that project.
“We are all about working to keep the animals safe,” Oberlin said.
“That’s probably the quickest thing we’ve had fixed,” Wandell said regarding that fencing.
County Commissioner Steven Verran, who had joined the committee for his first meeting in October, said he would prefer people in the county focus more on the Animal Shelter and less on library books.
“It’s got live beings. animals,” he said of the shelter.
The County Commission formed the Animal Care Advisory Committee last year in response to concerns about the Animal Shelter’s then-director Brian Porter.
Porter retired in July of that year.