A local committee needs close to a million dollars of extra funding to break ground on a new animal shelter in Chatham.
A report coming to Chatham-Kent council on Monday recommends that a tender of $2,348,882 (including HST) for construction of a revised 6,200 sq ft new animal shelter is awarded to Agri-Urban Building Inc. The report also recommends that $820,305 of additional funding be provided from the municipality's Strategic Reserve to fund the project.
Marjorie Crew, Friends of the New Animal Shelter Committee co-chair, says the group has been fundraising for the past four years for the new animal shelter, but is still falling short when to comes to covering building costs.
"Based on those numbers that came in on other structures of similar builds, we thought we were ready to go," explains Crew. "We hired the architect and got the quotes... the tenders all came back shockingly higher than we expected."
Crew says they took some things out of the building plan to save on cash, but the group still needs another $820,305 to get construction started on the new shelter.
She says fundraising that amount of money would be a challenge.
"We've raised over $900,000 from the community," says Crew. "We feel that it's time to get it finish... it's went on too long."
Crew says if the funding is approved, construction will start right away and there will probably be a ribbon cutting sometime in the fall.
"We're really hoping that council sees the value in building this for our animal friends in our community because they deserve much more than what it's been in the past 15 years... it's been in deplorable condition," she says.