CMHS questions Boone County Animal Care’s shelter fundraiser | Mid-Missouri News

COLUMBIA — A Columbia-based animal care group is concerned that Boone County Animal Care’s $3 million fundraising campaign to finance a no-kill facility will divide resources.

Boone County Animal Care, a Columbia-based animal rescue that currently offers foster care services for cats, announced the campaign Nov. 5.

Leadership from the Central Missouri Humane Society is questioning the ability of Boone County Animal Care to establish the proposed space for $3 million.

“We’ve been doing this building project for long enough, I know how much stuff costs,” Humane Society Associate Director Michelle Casey said. “So I’m just really curious what that would look like.”

The Central Missouri Humane Society has also been running a $25 million fundraising campaign for a new facility for the last five years.

“It’s so important that we get this fundraising done because I don’t know how much longer we have in this facility,” Casey said. “We want to do this once, and we want to do it right. We’re building a 100-year-old building, and it’s going to make such a transformative difference in the community.”

Boone County Animal Care has been serving the community for 13 years. It hopes to find an existing property and transform it to accommodate its needs.

“We’re a foster-based cat rescue currently. But when we do expand, we will open up to cats and dogs and small animals,” Boone County Animal Care Founder Jennifer Romesburg said. “So we need a much larger facility to be able to get to our goal.” 

Romesburg said Columbia is growing rapidly, and the need for more animal care is growing along with it.

“We want to help in a much larger capacity and do more lifesaving events and have more programs that actually help the community,” Romesburg said. 

One of Romesburg’s main goals with the new facility is to have a dedicated, affordable trap-neuter-return service.

“One of the main things I want to focus on when we start is a low-cost spay and neuter program,” Romesburg said. “We do have two facilities in town that are supposed to do low-cost programs, but since they’ve raised their rates, it’s no longer affordable to people in the county.”

The Central Missouri Humane Society offers TNR services for $30 per cat but can perform only up to three per day. This is in addition to its adoptable pets and low-cost client surgery schedule.

“It’s very limiting, especially when we’re trying to trap colonies, which colonies could include 10 cats or more. It’s just not as big as the program needs to be,” Romesburg said. “So our shelter wants to actually go out and fix the overpopulation with a TNR dedicated program.”

Columbia/Boone County Animal Control has 25 contracted spaces for animals at CMHS but said they’re often filled.

“There have been times in which the CMHS has hit capacity for animals held at their building,” Animal Control Supervisor Kevin Meyers said. “During those times, we often request help from the community in holding onto lost dogs they’ve found and posting them on the Facebook lost and found group.”

Romesburg also said Boone County Animal Care wants to approach sheltering animals in a new way.

“There are more innovative styles on how to save lives and get these animals into safety,” Romesburg said. “We want to focus on having a homelike setting with rooms like this — where animals won’t actually have cages, they will just have their colonies.”

She said she believes it will make the shelter experience less frightening for the animals and less intimidating for the potential adopters.

Romesburg said that the new facility will also operate as an open intake shelter, but Casey said she thinks multiple facilities might be complicated for the county to navigate when it comes to stray animals.

“I would hate to duplicate services that we’re already performing as the only open admission shelter in our county,” Casey said. “OK, so we’re going to have two separate spaces in the community? If you lose an animal, you’re going to have to go to two separate locations to look for a stray? It would make a lot more sense if you lost something to have all the strays go to one place.”

Casey also said multiple large-scale campaigns might divide resources that are trying to accomplish the same goal.

“I would hate to stall our campaign and have people worrying about fundraising for two big campaigns in the community when, at the end of the day, we’re all after the same goal — and that’s to be here for the animals that need us.” 

The Central Missouri Humane Society has currently raised $11 million of its $25 million goal to build a new shelter.

“We’re so close to being able to put shovels in the ground … so I would just hate for our campaign to suffer and push back that date for breaking ground,” Casey said. 

But Romesburg said waiting for the Central Missouri Humane Society to reach its goal isn’t an option anymore.

“We don’t have time to wait for the $25 million immaculate facility that they want to build. We need something now, before that shelter is condemned,” Romesburg said. “And that’s why it’s so important to me to get this out there and start doing it.”

Boone County Animal Care’s initial release also stated its space would be the first no-kill shelter in Boone County, drawing mixed feedback from the public.

“For BCAC to say they’re hoping to build the first no-kill shelter in our community is simply not true,” Casey said. “No-kill is a term we don’t use because there’s no universally held definition … usually, a 90% (placement rate) or above is considered no-kill, and that is something we’ve maintained.”

While Romesburg acknowledges CMHS’s statistics, she said “no-kill” is more than a designation; it’s a philosophy.

She said she believes “no-kill” is about going out into the community and solving the overpopulation problem at its root cause. Romesburg also said she didn’t expect people to get caught up over the terminology.

“I thought, ‘Hey, this was going to be an amazing opportunity and people are going to be all for it.’ I had no idea that people would get so particular on wording,” Romesburg said. “That’s not the big picture; we’re trying to do a lot of good here and help animals.”

Romesburg said she hopes people don’t think they have to pick between shelters to support and that there is more than enough need for two in the community.

“I think they’re very worried now about them getting to $25 million when now I’m trying to raise $3 (million). I think they see that as a roadblock for them,” Romesburg said.

Both organizations said they don’t want competition between groups in the community.

“The last thing we want in the community is a competition between any organizations that are working toward the same goal. That’s just silly,” Casey said. “The more that we’re working together and pooling our resources, the bigger impact that we can make on the pets that really need us.”

“It’s not a competition. We just want to make animals’ lives better, and we just have a new way of doing it,” Romesburg said. “Columbia is big enough for two.”