SILVERDALE – The Kitsap Humane Society will soon have more space for its dogs and cats to live while they wait for a new home in a new facility set to open next summer.
The organization plans to raise $7.5 million for a new 9,000-square-foot adoption center and a renovation of its current home on Dickey Road. Over the last 18 months, the Kitsap Humane Society has pulled in about $4.6 million of its goal and plans to break ground for the new facility Tuesday, said Eric Stevens, executive director of the humane society.
“Our main goal is to have our dogs and cats be adopted out as quickly as they can (be),” he said. “Providing better housing for them and a better experience for the customer will help accomplish that.”
The new adoption center will have more housing space for felines, including “colony” rooms where cats can roam free. The humane society will also replace a single noisy area it currently uses to house dogs with nine quieter rooms with larger kennels, an environment that it believes will be less stressful for the animals, Stevens said.
“We’re trying to get away from the old feeling of when customers come in it being an old dog pound,” Stevens said. “We want it to more comfortable for the dogs and quieter for the customers coming in.”
The new facility will also have a larger lobby and more space where prospective adopters can sit down and talk with a humane society representative, he said.
The second phase of the expansion, the renovation of the current building, will likely begin in late 2019 or early 2020 and give the organization more space for surgery and recovery areas and yield more space for fostering coordination, behavior training, admissions, back-room facilities for laundry and dish-washing, grooming and parking, Stevens said.
The existing building was constructed in 1989 and has served more than 200,000 animals in the three decades since then, according to the society. The building has received several smaller renovations over the years, but the group says that the number of animals it’s receiving has far outpaced the capacity of the current facility.
Stevens said the expansion will allow the humane society to provide more space to the approximately 7,000 animals it takes in each year as it continues to become more of a regional adoption center. Stevens said that of the 5,800 adoptions the humane society did last year, around 1,200 were by residents of neighboring counties.
“Our primary goal is to improve the quality of service,” he said. “We believe that with a better facility that many animals can get adopted out more quickly and we’ll attract more customers because animals will do better in this environment. We’re not trying to add to our volume, but by trying to have better housing, we think we’ll improve adoption speed, and we think that will result in some continued growth in our numbers.”
