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Animal Welfare to build facility
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The Animal Welfare League of Trumbull County will convert a 21-acre sports complex into a state-of-the-art animal shelter and education center. After getting donations and pledges of $2 million, the league purchased the former ThunderPlex site on state Route 193 near state Route 82 for $550,000.
By Ed Runyan
VIENNA
Over the course of the next year, the Animal Welfare League of Trumbull County will convert a 21-acre indoor and outdoor softball complex near Squaw Creek Country Club into a state-of-the-art animal shelter and education center.
After getting donations and pledges of $2 million, the league on March 30 purchased the former ThunderPlex site on state Route 193 near state Route 82 for $550,000.
The building on the site is 47,000 square feet, or roughly 26 times larger than the league’s current 1,808-square-foot facility on three acres on Brunstetter Road in Lordstown.
In addition to giving the league much more room and highway access, the facility eventually will have medical facilities for animal surgeries and a place where students at the veterinary technology program at Kent State University will be able to learn, said Barbara Busko, president of the league.
Kent State University at Trumbull will begin its new veterinary technology program this fall, Daniel Palmer, assistant dean, said during remarks at the facility.
Busko and many of the league’s employees and volunteers gave tours of the facility Wednesday before renovations get under way.
“I think the students coming out of the program are going to be so much better prepared than students at other programs,” said Rufus Sparks, a veterinarian who works closely with the league.
The new facility will provide the students with numerous animals to work on to get clinical experience, which is better than working on plastic animals or having one animal for many students to share, Sparks said.
Busko called the partnership between the league, university and the Trumbull Career and Technical Center’s animal-management program a “revolutionary concept.”
“We are very excited to have taken this major step in moving forward on our plans to build a larger, full-service animal shelter,” Busko said.
The league, which had originally wanted to raise $6.6 million in order to construct a new facility on Educational Highway in Champion near the KSU campus, decided to renovate an existing facility to reduce the cost.
Renovating the ThunderPlex will cost $100 per square foot. New construction would have been at least twice that, Busko said.
“We kicked off our capital campaign [in 2009] despite a struggling economy and have managed to raise enough funds to complete the first phase of our new shelter,” Busko said.
“The ThunderPlex is the ideal location for us because it provides us with not only the type of indoor space we need to house and care for more animals, but also the grounds that will allow us to create spacious outdoor dog runs, a barn for neglected farm animals, a public dog park and areas to host community events.”
The current facility can hold around 100 animals, but the new one will house upward of 250 cats and kittens, dogs and puppies.
The facility will also have an indoor dog park, puppy play area, private adoption rooms, heated intake area and large pet-supply store.
Architectural drawings on display showed where the Trumbull County Dog Warden eventually will have offices in the new facility.
Barb Busko and her sister Mary, another league board member, said the dog warden’s office will eventually turn over all of the animals it now houses in its kennel on Anderson Avenue in Howland and have the league house them instead.
The Howland kennel eventually will close, the Busko sisters said.
However, Gwen Logan, executive dog warden for the county, said she knows nothing about that. None of the three county commissioners attended the open house, and none returned phone calls seeking comment.
Fundraising for an additional $2.5 million will continue. More information is available at www.animalwelfareohio.com.