The Rockland County Legislature’s Planning & Public Works Committee took a first step Tuesday night into possibly deciding the future of Hi-Tor Animal Care Center, the only animal shelter in the county.  At the meeting, the group started a review process of Hi-Tor and its building by speaking with Robert Gruffi, director of facilities management for Rockland; Roberta Bangs, Hi-Tor president, and Vivian Kiggins, Hi-Tor executive director.

Michael Grant, chair of the committee, said Tuesday night’s review was going to be limited to the actual facility, and they’ll review more in the future.

Hi-Tor is facing financial difficulties as well as an aging building. Actually, when Gruffi said he would rate the building as “fair,” it drew a laugh from many of the people in the audience.

“The building itself as I rate fair, is from a physical standpoint,” he said. “The roof does need a replacement. There is no question about it. However, we do not have sufficient funds to replace the roof so what we are doing right now is just maintaining it and patching it. Does it develop leaks over time? Yes, but there’s just so much you can do. The roof does need replacing and it should be replaced as soon as possible.”

He added that some other exterior items, such as windows and doors, also need replacing.

Legislators Ed Day and Alden Wolfe pushed for the review to be brought to the committee as soon as possible, and during the meeting, Wolfe said he thinks there are three options to look into: renovating the current building, building an entirely new facility or looking for the shelter to move from its current location of 65 Firemen’s Memorial Drive in Pomona.

“If you do keep the building, I’m not at the point where I can provide you with an estimate, but it will be a good couple of hundred thousand dollars easily just to fix basic things up and bring it to a level of good quality,” Gruffi said. “Not excellent, but good quality.”

Gerold Bierker, a former legislator, also spoke at the review. While he was with the legislature, he said he referred to the county as “slumlords” in terms of looking at Hi-Tor. He said the same Tuesday, as well as talked about some work he did with Hi-Tor while he was still a legislator.

“I put together a list in consultation with the staff over at Hi-Tor together with Mr. Gruffi’s office as to what has to be done, not in terms of bringing this up to a Taj Mahal, but just making sure that nobody gets killed,” Bierker said. “We divided up the list of county responsibilities, shelter responsibilities and we came to some sort of an agreement. Everybody got copies of the result of that, including the disputed areas where the county said ‘that’s not ours’ and the shelter said that’s not theirs.”

Bierker said they should look back into what they came up with on that list to see if the building is worth saving.

Wolfe asked for an action item from Gruffi to give the committee recommendations from his department about what to do with the building, including a list of work needed to be done and the estimated cost.

“That will give us the answers to a lot of questions that us and everyone in this room probably has,” Wolfe said.

Bangs and Kiggins talked about the state of the building and working out of it. Bangs said the kennel locks are breaking, the kennels are old and at some points they don’t even have enough kennels. Kiggins recalled a time when they didn’t have enough kennels.

“There’s no space for the animals,” she said. “We had six dogs in the kitchen. That’s the only space the staff had to make their lunch.”

Still, Kiggins said she doesn’t think it’s right to start killing off animals that come in and aren’t adopted just to free up the building.

“To euthanize for space would be abhorrent to me,” she said. “To euthanize for disease or age or behavior is fine, but to euthanize for space is horrible. No one wants to do that and no one should. A county as affluent as Rockland should never allow this.”

Kiggins also mentioned some of the other conditions the more than 500 volunteers have to deal with, including not having a shower area to really clean off.

“It’s kind of shocking to be in this building most of the time. It’s impossible to keep clean,” she said. “Most of the time I have the staff painting just to put a clean coating on some of the walls because the place is run down, falling apart, so old.”

Both Day and Bangs said Tuesday night was a good first step for the legislature and Hi-Tor, but Bangs added that it wasn’t enough.

“In order for you to be able to help us the way I know you want to help us, we need to have all the town supervisors here, we need to have the county executive here, it needs to be everybody pulling together,” she said. “This is a wonderful first step, and we deeply, deeply appreciate this. But it is long overdue and we still have to get the municipalities involved.”