Faulkner County’s Animal Shelter Project?
With our “new” Quorum Court and County Judge in place for 2023-2024, the County is starting to look again at some long-standing issues.
We checked in recently with JP Maree Coats (R, Dist. 2), before she announced some upcoming Committee action on this issue at last week’s Quorum Court meeting. (Coats has served on the Community Animal Shelter Development Committee since before her election.)
She reported that former County Judge Jim Baker had instructed architect Rik Sowell late in 2022 to develop a “scaled-down” plan for an animal shelter on the County’s Springhill flea market property.
Key Problem Remains
As before, however, a key problem remains to be addressed: how to fund ongoing operations of such a shelter?
The last report on staffing suggested five full-time and six part-time employees for a shelter holding up to 40 dogs and 40 cats. As of August, 2022, three grants for funding have been submitted but none had been awarded, while two donations totaling $65,000 have been received.
As Coats indicated on March 21, no meetings for the Community Animal Shelter Development Committee have been set so far in 2023; County Judge Allen Dodson has not yet indicated whether he will reappoint this working committee. (UPDATE 09/12/2023: coats reported at her Courts & Public Safety Committee meeting that the animal shelter committee had expired at the end of former Judge Jim Baker’s term in December, 2022.)
We should point out the Arkansas Attorney General’s May 2022 opinion that all County working committee meetings should be open to the public and press. (Ignoring the ruling, former County Judge Jim Baker continued to hold working committee meetings in private, barring both JPs and the public from hearing details, through the end of his term in December, 2022.)
Of course this AG opinion, based on the current FOIA law, assumes the current open meeting FOIA law remains intact — an unlikely outcome if state lawmakers pass HB1610.
Revised Plans
Here’s Sowell’s latest revised schematic, as well as a revised construction schedule for a shelter that might cost from $2.4 million to $2.8 million to construct:
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