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Fur Flies Over Hillsborough Animal Shelter Swelter
Tribune photo by ROBERT BURKE
People look to adopt dogs as a large floor fan helps circulate air at Animal Services. A member of animal services advisory committee complains that dogs at the shelter are suffering from the heat; exhaust fans originally built for the building have never worked.
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Published: July 24, 2008
TAMPA - Walk in the front doors at the Hillsborough County animal shelter and you get a blast of air conditioning and relief from the broiling weather outside.
But in the shelter's three kennels, where hundreds of dogs stay around the clock, it's a different story.
The air is thick and smelly and the dogs mostly lie on the concrete floors to stay cool.
Each kennel has six large ventilation fans along the top of one wall. The fans, installed when the building went up in 1992, are rusted and corroded. Eight of the fans don't work.
Worse, the fans have never been able to do the job of circulating air through and out of the cages where the dogs stay.
"It wasn't designed right," said Terry Goodman, county superintendent of plant operations. "It was just circulating air from the top. Even now the fans are not sufficient for this space."
Animal Services officials were aware of the problem over the years but say other priorities were paramount for an agency that houses about 35,000 stray, lost or dangerous dogs a year.
Goodman said each building should have had twice the number of ventilation fans. On Monday, workers from the county Facilities Management Department were replacing a fan motor in kennel "A." Fans in the other buildings will not be fixed, however.
"Instead of putting in something here that doesn't work, we're going to try to find something that does," Goodman said.
Until about four weeks ago, many of the ceiling fans in the kennels didn't work either. Connie Johnson, chairwoman of the county Animal Advisory Committee, noticed the problem while spending time with a foster dog she visits regularly at the kennel.
"I walked him, then went in the kennel to sit and give him some one-on-one attention," Johnson said. "I said to myself, 'It's hot back here; it's stifling. I can't breathe here.' "
When she asked shelter workers about the heat, they told her the ventilation fans had never worked properly. Johnson said she also noticed there were no ceiling fans in the fixtures in the three kennels.
Johnson said she talked to Dennis McCullough, acting director of Animal Services, about the heat, and ceiling fans were installed.
McCullough said he ordered the fans to be replaced after taking over the shelter when Animal Services director Bill Armstrong was reassigned to the county Affordable Housing Office.
"I don't know if any of them was working then," McCullough said. "It was a time when it really started getting warm again. That's when I noticed it in the kennel, and I had the fans replaced."
The shelter, at 440 Falkenburg Road, opened its doors in February 1993. The $4.4 million building was finished about a year behind schedule and about $1 million over the original cost estimate.
The construction delays were in part because of disagreements between Animal Services and the advisory committee over the building's design.
Don Coryell, who served on the advisory committee, said the county ignored advice from him and other committee members with experience running kennels.
"There were some things that could have been done to make it more comfortable and easier to maintain," Coryell said.
Armstrong was hired as Animal Services director in October 1996. He said he remembers being told then that fewer ventilation fans were installed than had been in the building's original design plans. The reason: to save money.
Additional fans were never added because it was considered a low priority, Armstrong said. It was more important to add employees to deal with the agency's broadened responsibilities after the County Commission passed an animal control ordinance in 1990.
"With the number of animals we have, my senior leadership was requesting me to fight hard for additional staffing," Armstrong said.
"We didn't have enough people in the field that we needed to do what we needed to do 24-7."
McCullough, the acting director, said there has never been a case of an animal suffering heat stroke in the kennels.
County Commissioner Brian Blair, who was alerted to heat problems in the kennels by a constituent, said he's glad the problem is finally being addressed.
"It really makes me upset to think that for many years all of these animals have lived in overly hot or overly cool conditions because of the lack of maintenance," Blair said, "or that a system that was designed to keep the animals comfortable has never worked."
Reporter Mike Salinero can be reached at (813) 259-8303 or msalinero@tampatrib.com.
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