San Antonio’s Animal Care Services (ACS) department is laying plans to expand canine kennel capacity at its Westside campus by about 30% — an effort aimed at giving shelter staff more time to find placements for stray dogs that enter their care.
On Thursday the City Council approved $552,000 for Alamo Architects Inc. to design a new 52-kennel, 7,880 square-foot “stray animal overflow” facility, which doesn’t yet have funding designated for its construction.
“Ultimately, there’s a lot of work to be done or to make this happen, but we wanted to get a design done on it so that we could get a cost, so that we could then possibly pursue how we may be able to fund it,” ACS Director Jonathan Gary told the San Antonio Report.
Alamo Architects is already engaged in designing a roughly $13 million overhaul of the city’s main ACS campus — built in 2007 on the West Side near the San Antonio Food Bank.
The city’s 2022 bond program called for construction of a new animal hospital and recovery kennels, a new adoption center and additional administrative space on that site. The city expects to break ground on that work early next year, with a completion date around June 2027.
Plans to add more dog kennels to the campus’ overhaul come as city leaders have been under tremendous pressure to cut down on the number of stray and roaming dogs living on the street — as well as reduce the number of animals being euthanized in their shelter.
After a string of high-profile dog maulings, the city increased ACS’s annual budget tremendously in 2023 and 2024, adding more officers to respond to residents’ calls for assistance with bites and roaming animals.
At the same time, animal welfare groups were starting to raise concerns about the city’s declining live release rate — meaning the percent of healthy animals that enter the city’s care and are adopted, returned to their owners or transferred, compared to the number of those euthanized.
Gary said Thursday that ACS has been ramping up its adoption events and making steady progress on improving its live release numbers.
But compared to other municipal shelters, he said, ACS is under-equipped to handle the high number of animals coming through its doors.
“When dogs come in, we have about five to six days to find placement for them, just due to the volume,” said Gary, who took over leading the department in January. “Having this additional kennel space would allow us to potentially give more dogs time to find placement … through adoption or through our transfer partners.”
San Antonio’s main shelter has about 168 dog kennels — plus about 20 temporary dog enclosures that staff set up — and took in about 21,000 dogs last year, Gary said. For comparison, he said, the shelter he came from in Oklahoma City had 240 kennels and took in about 9,000 dogs per year.
“We’re saving eight and a half out of 10 dogs that come into our building currently, and while we’re not happy with that, we want to save more, … that’s still pretty incredible considering the general space that we have and the number of dogs coming in every day,” Gary said.
ACS is also requesting that the new kennels are built in a more modern style, giving the animals more space to reduce their stress levels and make it easier to clean, so that animals stay healthier while they’re on the campus.
“It’ll be important for a number of different reasons, but mostly to help toward increasing our life-saving efforts,” Gary said.
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