County moves forward on $5.8M animal shelter
Grading work on the five-acre site of the planned new Anderson County Animal Shelter should begin within the next few days as the contractor prepares to build the $5.8 million facility on Carden Farm Road in Clinton, says County Mayor Terry Frank.
The city of Clinton on Feb. 17 issued a grading permit for the project.
Once the work begins, construction should take “365 days” to complete, according to the contract approved by the County Commission.
The new shelter, which could end up being one of the crowning achievements of Frank’s tenure as mayor, has been designed as a state-of-the-art animal-care center that will rival the best that can be found in Tennessee and even beyond.
Frank’s office has been working on the project for at least six years, and she said she’s glad to see all the efforts to create the new shelter finally coming to fruition.
“We are super-excited about it,” she said Friday as she looked over the site. “It’s been a long time coming.”
The “state of the art” shelter will replace a decidedly inferior one on Blockhouse Valley Road that sits on the site of a county recycling center, she said.
Frank, a lifelong animal lover and advocate who has three cats of her own, said she and others working on the new shelter’s design “visited multiple shelters, walking through to see what works and what doesn’t.”
Those included newer shelters in Putnam, Blount and Hamilton counties.
The Anderson County Commission on Dec. 15 approved the contract for the new shelter in a 10-5 vote, naming Place Services Inc. as the builder, based on its submission of the lowest bid that met the project architect’s requirements.
Votes against building the new shelter came from Commissioner Joshua Anderson, and commissioners Tracy Wandell, Chad McNabb, Shelly Vandagriff and Jerry White. Absent for the vote was Commissioner Sabra Beauchamp.
Wandell and Anderson have questioned the cost of the new shelter and how it’s being financed.
Frank said the bulk of the money is coming from a low-interest U.S. Department of Agriculture loan, which does not require a county tax increase to pay off.
Sitting about a quarter-of-a-mile from the city of Clinton’s Carden Farm Dog Park, the new shelter will be built on a tract given to the county by the city. It’s on the east side of Carden Farm Road on a mostly wooded lot.
Frank said that about 2.6 of the five acres “will be disturbed” to build the shelter, with the rest left mostly intact, including its trees.
“We designed this to be a community center, so it has a very open public space in the front,” Frank said. “We’ve got an area that’ll kind of be like our PetSmart area in Oak Ridge, with some glass where people can see the cats playing. We’re even planning on a kitty cam.
“We want the adoptable pets to be out there in a place where people can enjoy them, interact with them, and consider adoption,” she said. “We’ve got adoption rooms, counseling rooms.
“We’ve got a big community room that we intend to hold training classes for folks, whether that’s volunteers or whether that’s animal training, where people come in,” Frank said. “We want it to be a place where the schools are comfortable bringing the students there, interacting.
“So, we’ve got a large public space that’s in the front, and in the back is where the business is,” she said. “We have a separate entrance where people who find a stray animal or are having to do an animal surrender can pull in there. It’s designed as kind of a chute with an exam room, a surgery center there.
“We’re going to be looking at, hopefully, a potential partnership with one of the universities so we can be a place where they can train their vet students, and we will of course have qualified professionals to be able to do spay and neuter for the community.”
There’s even going to be a large laundry facility, Frank said.
“Laundry is a big deal in a shelter,” she said. “We noticed that most of the shelters did not plan sufficiently for just the sheer volume of laundry. We will have a giant utility room where the sinks are going to be, with heavy duty laundry equipment and lots of storage space.
“We’ve going to leave a lot of the trees, so we’ve got a nice place for people to walk dogs,” Frank said. “The Clinton dog park is right around the corner, so people can just walk over there and take some of the pets for an outing. I just think it’s a great marriage of locations with the dog park and the shelter close by.”
