New county animal shelter in Olmito proposed

SAN BENITO — A Cameron County commissioner says he wants the county to replace its aging and overcrowded animal shelter as quickly as possible.

Precinct 2 Commissioner Ernie Hernandez said he will urge County Judge Carlos Cascos and fellow commissioners to close the 1985-era shelter — once a county garage and warehouse — and build a new one on a large tract of land the county owns near the sheriff’s office and jail on Old Alice Road near Olmito.

"I hope to light a fire under the other commissioners to get this thing going," he said.

The shelter is behind the county’s Precinct 3 warehouse near the former San Benito city airport, land now used as fairgrounds

Officials have said county property near San Benito is too small and the septic system would need more land if the shelter were expanded there.

Most stray dogs are held only 72 hours before being euthanized, said Yvette Salinas, administrator of the county’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Dogs that appear to be pets with collars and grooming are held longer in hopes owners will claim them, or that someone may adopt them, she said.

A new animal shelter with an area to exercise the dogs and for volunteers to prepare them for adoption should be built, Hernandez said.

"We’ve got 80 to 100 acres there (at Olmito)," Hernandez said. "That’s in my precinct and there are a lot of animal activists in the north part of Brownsville who would like to see it be moved there."

The county needs to attract the interests of citizens who might volunteer to help set up and operate a new center, possibly along with an animal hospital, Hernandez said.

He said he is willing to push for the project and gather as much support as he can.

"I’ll meet with anybody, any time, any place," he said.

The county approved a big bond issue last year, and Hernandez said he has $500,000 in building funds in his precinct budget.

He plans to urge other commissioners to also contribute funds from their budgets to build a new animal shelter so that dogs and cats collected by county animal control officers would be kept for a longer time, giving them a better chance of being adopted through a larger, more attractive animal shelter.

Precinct 3 Commissioner David Garza said he is open to the idea of a new animal shelter but has serious reservations about using bond or certificate of obligation money that was approved for a project for some other purpose than what was designated.

"All of us voted on those projects," Garza said.

He would only discuss it in an open Commissioners Court meeting, if attorneys first approve it, Garza said.

"If Commissioner Hernandez wants to give up one of his projects to build an animal rescue center, I’m open to that. But I’m not going to discuss it outside of a county meeting."

Cascos said he also favors the idea of an entirely new shelter and believes Olmito is the right place because there is plenty of land available there already owned by the county.

The idea that volunteers in the community might help run the center could work, the judge said. In Harlingen, the city built a new animal shelter about 20 years ago and then turned its operation over to the Humane Society, an idea that could work with a county-wide shelter, he said.

"The animal shelter has been a problem for a long, long time," Cascos said. "This past Monday, I got with (County Administrator) Pete Sepulveda to ask for a legal opinion from our bond counsel if we could re-appropriate or re-designate the monies we issued on that bond issue in June of 2011, $24 million."

Some of the money could possibly be spent on an animal shelter, even though it wasn’t listed on the bond issue, Cascos said.

"There were bond proceeds to go to numerous projects," the judge said. "One of those projects was a community center in Olmito. It was probably $300,000 to $500,000 to buy land and build a building. So what I told Pete was to check with Commissioner Hernandez to see if he would have a problem to re-appropriate that money.

"But first, we’ve got to have our legal department and our bond counsel to research whether we can use funds from that June 2011 bond issue," Cascos said.

If attorneys say it would be legal to use bond funds to construct an animal shelter, he’ll put the matter on the agenda for the next Commissioners Court meeting, the judge said.

"Where I would like to see this animal shelter go up would be by the jail," he said. "We still have a whole bunch of property. That was the initial intent when we bought all that property was to do things like that."

Garza said that although major improvements were made to the animal shelter at his precinct warehouse three years ago, the land there wouldn’t go to waste if it were closed.

"I supposed we could always pile up some more tires," he said, laughing.

County crews are constantly bringing back illegally discarded tires found along county roads or in ditches, the commissioner said.