Town of Huntington hires firm to design upgrades for dog shelter

The Town of Huntington’s canines are getting an upgraded doghouse.

Town officials have hired a firm to come up with a design for the partial renovation and repair of the town animal shelter on Deposit Road in East Northport.

Melville-based Nelson & Pope Engineering, Architecture and Land Surveying PLLC was awarded the contract after the town issued a request for proposals in May to renovate the 30-year-old building, according to town documents.

The building has the capacity for 80 dogs and has a staff of 13.

The company will be paid $202,000 for a 30-month contract, according to town documents. Improvements to the HVAC and sound systems and temperature and noise controls, as well as some structural improvements, are expected, town officials said. But the facility will not be expanded.

“This is an investment,” Town Supervisor Ed Smyth said. “Like any other active facility, it requires routine maintenance and then heavy maintenance. Heavy maintenance is the phase we are moving into now.”

Plans for the renovation come just ahead of a Dec. 15 deadline for upgraded licensing standards to be enacted for all animal shelters, rescue organizations and other nonprofits. Previously licensing by the state Department of Agriculture and Markets was only required for municipal shelters.

The department already makes annual unannounced inspections at municipal shelters to issue a license, town officials said.

The tighter standards and inclusion of other animal welfare agencies is an effort to “increase standards of care for animals in shelters throughout the state,” according to the state's website.

Michael Costa, the shelter supervisor and the division head for animal control for the town, said that given the age of the building — and advancements in areas such as HVAC, air quality, sound control and waste evacuation since it was built — the improvements will support the "progressive programs" at the shelter.

“It was built at a time when it was more about animal warehousing and then animal welfare, so while it’s structurally sound and meets our needs, there are certainly some things we’re looking to move forward,” he said.

Among the programs that shelter staffers pride themselves in offering is an evaluation and behavior testing program before they put dogs up for adoption. 

Costa said the no-kill shelter averages about 30 dogs at any given time. But the length of stay is normally short.

He said before stray dogs are put up for adoption, they are medically and behaviorally evaluated as well as held for several days to give owners a chance to reclaim their lost pet.

New York State requires shelters to hold stray dogs for five days, but in Huntington the dogs are held for seven days, he said.

He said a priority for the renovation will be to have the shelter meet new state standards. 

“We’re also looking to bring a little bit more comfort to the dogs," he said. "The building becomes a tool — everything when you are working with animals becomes a tool.”

In 2021, the town board voted to bond $6 million to help pay for a long-proposed dog shelter in Halesite on Creek Road. The estimated maximum cost of the shelter was $7 million. But the plan was scrapped, Smyth said, because after the COVID-19 pandemic, “the cost estimates of the shelter continued to spiral up and up until it got to a point where it made no sense to move forward with it, because we were talking well over $10 million to complete a new facility.”

Richard Murdocco, an adjunct professor of planning for Stony Brook University's public policy graduate program, said investing in infrastructure is part of the responsibility of government and sometimes a conduit to deliver municipal service.

“You can’t deliver animal shelter services without an animal shelter structure,” Murdocco said. “Suburban governments since the 1960s have grown in their scope in the types of services they provide.”

He said the added state mandate for shelters to be licensed is another consideration.

“The state changes its standards and that’s an unfunded mandate,” he said. “So when the state changes, the locality needs to comply with state law and that involves increasing costs.”