City Council members will take up the city's planned animal facility again on Tuesday, when an update on the project is one of two items on a 3:45 p.m. work session agenda. The session meets in Training Room 252 on the second floor of the George A. Purefoy Municipal Center, 6101 Frisco Square Blvd. No vote on the shelter is listed.
As of Saturday, no staff memo or presentation had been posted with the item.
Where the plan stood in September
At a Sept. 1 work session, Ken Schmidt, the city's director of special projects at the time, walked council members through a revised version of the plan, according to the meeting minutes and the slides attached to them.
Under that version, the city would collect all of the facility's revenue and pay its expenses, a nonprofit would manage the building for a fee, and a surgical veterinarian would lease space, pay the city rent and treat stray animals under contract.
The redesign trimmed about 1,000 square feet of floor space and planned for 61 dog kennels, 34 of them available to lease to rescue groups, plus 34 cat kennels.
Staff projected about $559,000 a year in revenue, mostly from renting kennels to rescue groups, against about $1.29 million in yearly expenses. Counting roughly $650,000 the city expects to save by leaving its county shelter arrangement, the slides put the net new cost to the city at about $85,000 a year in 2026 dollars.
The slides also estimated the city's worst-case exposure at about $530,000 a year if the rescue boarding and veterinary revenue did not materialize.
Staff asked for direction to draft a partnership agreement and a design contract and to hire a construction manager. Instead, the minutes say, the council told staff to revisit the project, return with an optimal program and plan for the facility, and look again at which organizations might be willing to partner with the city.
The Dallas Morning News reported that Schmidt has put the facility's cost at about $23 million and that Mayor Mark Hill asked staff to bring construction costs down.
