The Bald Knob City Council is holding a special meeting Monday to decide if the city will move forward with the low bid it has received for a quarantine building for the shelter.
At the September Bald Knob City Council meeting, Bald Knob Animal Control Committee member Mary Hodges said it had received bids for the building “and we’d like to start on them.” She said there was quite a bit of difference in the few bids that came in.
“I think it ought to go in front of the dog committee or the building [Buildings and Grounds] committee and iron out what they want to do,” Hodges said. “We want to start building it by winter.”
Hodges said the low bid is now $55,108.55, but she didn’t say who had made it but reportedly it is “turnkey and will be delivered and ready to go”if the city approves it.The others were $75,000 (from Pearrow Construction in Bald Knob) and $68,479 (from Double J Construction in Judsonia). He made a motion to accept the low bid “to get this on the go because we’ve been doing this like for three years.”
Hodges said, “Thank you,” but Mayor Barth Grayson said he wanted everyone to wait a minute because Hodges had said she wanted the committee to look at the bids.
Smith responded, “We were the ones at the committee … .” Committee Chairman Dennis Rutherford added, “You’re looking at the committee right here.”
“The money has been set aside for three years,” Smith said. “We just need to get it done. The good thing about this building here is if you move somewhere else you can pick it up and take it along. It is a self-sustained building,”
Hodges said the “dog quarantine” building would be on a concrete foundation. “If I had a dog – and I think as much of my animals as my grandkids – I wouldn’t want my dog put in there [the animal shelter] and not quarantined for 10 days.
“First of all, I wouldn’t have one gone for 10 days, but I wouldn’t want one throwed in there with parvo and everything else, and that’s what we’re running into. We’re putting them in there with parvo and they’re catching it and we’re treating every dog we got; we’re just recycling and then they die.”
Smith said if the council wanted him to withdraw his motion, he would so that the committee could look at the situation. Councilman Johnny Hodges urged that a meeting be held where questions could be answered by the bidder. He moved that if the committee approves the low bid, the city moves forward with it.
The committee will meet at 5 p.m. at City Hall.
Chuck Niementowski, treasurer for the Humane Society of Searcy, who also works in shelter management, was asked by The Daily Citizen about the need to quarantine animals.
He said the quarantine period is usually five days. “There’s a couple of different statutes out there. I have seen here and there where the state says 10, but I have also heard from others that they say it’s 5. The Searcy city ordinance is 5. Cabot is 5, most of them [other cities] it’s 5.”
He said five is what it “really only needs to be” because “it’s not the health quarantine so much as it is just to allow people to claim [an animal] before it gets adopted. It makes a big difference because if you have to quarantine for 10 days, it will tie your shelter up, so you would have more capacity essentially with the process of five days.”
“If somebody loses a dog, they will usually be there within the first day or two and then as the days click on more and more, find that it’s either two days or so or sometimes three or nothing,” he said.
Niementowski said parvo is mainly a concern with puppies “because any dogs that have been fully vaccinated or vaccinated won’t get it but unvaccinated puppies are very susceptible to it, especially when they come in from let’s call it less desirable conditions. … The parvo will get into the soil enough and it can last a long time out in the yard or something and then they have more puppies like some of these backyard breeders and then those puppies will get exposed.”
Niementowski said “a quarantine building is important to” the operation of a shelter “and if Bald knob can do it for $49,000, I’m shocked.” He said the city of Searcy and the Humane Society of Searcy “went halfsies on it in 2015 and put in our intake. It’s not that big, but it cost $150,000. It depends on the size of course.”
“It is an important thing because if you just stick them in general population, especially for the parvo thing with the puppies, it’s going to spread like wildfire and kill them all,” he said. “That’s very lethal. On real young puppies [in Searcy], we do keep them for 10 days [in quarantine], that’s because of the concern for parvo. Now, that’s not a regulation but we do that because of the concern of young puppies for parvo.”
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