The first $3,000 will be spent on a new animal shelter to serve all of Greene County.
The Greene County board of supervisors and the Jefferson city council each approved providing up to $1,500 to hire the architects Waggoner and Wineinger of Mason City to prepare a cost estimate for the shelter and assistance with subsequent fundraising.
Don Orris, the volunteer chair of the animal shelter steering committee, has already had conversations with Waggoner and Wineinger about the project. The firm will closely follow the preliminary plans presented by Orris to the supervisors and the city council last month.
The county supervisors on Monday heard from supervisor Dawn Rudolph, who is on the steering committee, that discussions are leading toward the county owning the facility once it is built, although 54 percent of the animals at the shelter come Jefferson.
Rudolph said she initially thought the city should own it, but she now thinks the other incorporated towns in the county will not participate financially if Jefferson owns it. “I’m not saying that as something bad toward the city of Jefferson, but we’re trying to get this mode of ‘Greene County.’ It’s everybody, rural, incorporated, everybody.”
Sheriff Steve Haupert said that over the past years, 10-12 percent of the sheriff’s office’s calls to the incorporated cities have been animal calls. He suggested that a portion of what the cities pay the county for law enforcement could go toward operation of the shelter. He said the shelter needs to be perceived as a county-wide shelter and that the smaller cities need to have a stake in it.
Rudolph said participation of those cities will be crucial in the ongoing operating budget.
Orris told the supervisors that the percentages of animals coming from each place and the percentages of the cost share could be reviewed periodically to be sure funding is done on a realistic basis.
County auditor Jane Heun said it is not “the norm” for a county to own an animal shelter. Orris said if there was the wherewithal for the shelter to be run by a community organization “it would be great, but we don’t have that organization.”
The supervisors approved the expense to come from its discretionary Louis Dreyfus fund, which is earmarked for community projects.
The city council approved the expense with very little discussion and without saying from which budget line the expense will come.
The plan is that no tax dollars be used for construction of the shelter, but that operational expenses be covered through a 28E agreement between Greene County and the city of Jefferson.
