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Clinton and Michel: Don't move Austin's animal shelter

Ryan Clinton and Lorri Michel, LOCAL CONTRIBUTORS

On weekends, Austinites spill into the city's animal shelter like teens into a rock concert. Visit the shelter's animal inhabitants, and you'll also be met with runners from the hike-and-bike trail, downtown strollers and a bevy of excited children fresh off adjacent playing fields.

Across the street from Town Lake west of downtown, the city's animal shelter buzzes with activity. Where million-dollar condos could rise, we have instead housed lost and homeless pets for the last 50 years — tens of thousands of dogs and cats each year that rely on the friendliness of strangers to avoid euthanasia. The shelter's location is an irreplaceable tool for saving lives — a site befitting and reflecting the compassion of our community.

Location aside, however, Austin's animal shelter is far from perfect.

Town Lake Animal Center is badly in need of the $12 million that voters recently dedicated to remodeling the shelter or rebuilding anew. Engineers must re-route the stormwater runoff from nearby properties away from the shelter's kennels. And state-of-the-art dog and cat rooms are needed to replace aging cages and runs.

The shelter's policies need restructuring, too. While other communities across the country — rich and poor alike —have dramatically reduced — and in some cases, ended — the killing of shelter pets, Austin continues to rely on killing as its primary method of animal control. The shelter has killed roughly half the animals it has taken in each of the past seven years despite a near doubling of its annual operating budget.

The amount of killing is staggering: 80,659 pets have been killed at the shelter since October 2000. That's 12,381 each year, 1,032 each month, 34 each day. The pound has put an animal to death every 12 minutes it has been open to the public this decade. Faced with the fact that cities like San Francisco and Ithaca, N.Y., no longer kill healthy, adoptable pets at their shelters, the systematic killing at the Austin facility is nothing short of tragic. Change is needed.

But moving the shelter away from downtown to the city's eastern edge — as the Austin City Council is planning — will only increase the killing. If the city moves the shelter, fewer pets will be adopted and more will die.

Rebuilding the shelter downtown is not only feasible, it's fiscally responsible. According to city documents, the shelter can be rebuilt on Town Lake — with modern amenities and proper drainage — for roughly the same price as relocating it. On the other hand, moving the shelter to East Austin will require a substantial increase in its multimillion-dollar annual operating budget to account for the less-visible location, the loss of volunteers (many of whom are University of Texas students) and reduced adoptions.

The current site is also closer to the areas of Austin where most strays come from and where most adopters come from. It is closer to the city's geographic and population centers. And it is in an area that is a daily destination for thousands of Austinites.

On top of all that, the current site is the people's clear choice. More than 5,000 Austinites have signed FixAustin.Org's petition opposing the move. A Public Information Act request revealed that e-mails to the City Council opposing the move outnumbered those supporting it 40 to 1. And the affected neighborhoods in West Austin and East Austin are united in opposition to the move.

Rather than putting our homeless pets out of sight and out of mind, let's be the kind of community we aspire to be and the kind of people our dogs think we are: compassionate, loyal, smart and kind. We can be that community by rebuilding our shelter at its current downtown location.

Clinton and Michel are members of FixAustin.Org, a nonprofit coalition working to end the killing of adoptable pets at Austin's shelter.