SPCA and City of Hamilton in ‘stalemate’ over cramped Dartnall Road building

Hamilton animal services and the local SPCA are cramped with growing pains after 20 years of shared space on Dartnall Road.

The city and charity alike say they need more room and are trying to find a path forward for use of the building.

But talks have reached a stalemate," John Gerrard, new CEO of the Hamilton/Burlington SPCA, told city council recently.

What we need to do is agree on a timeline as this has now been three years in the mix and possibly five years in discussion."

The impasse is rooted in ownership and an agreement between the two organizations to define space and financial disbursement," Gerrard said.

In the meantime, the SPCA is facing increasing demands and needs more room to improve its existing services including an expansion to its animal hospital, and for future plans, such as a behavioural centre mostly for dogs, he noted.

In addition to a regular wait list, the SPCA must have capacity to quickly respond to hundreds of animals requiring attention in short order, Gerrard said.

We just recently had 300 guinea pigs in the City of Hamilton that needed housing. Those are the kinds of things that come to us on an ongoing basis."

The roughly 43,000-square-foot building was built on municipal land in 1996 with the help of federal and provincial dollars. The city service has shared its paw print with the SPCA there since 2003.

The type, scope and scale of our work has increased over the last 20 years and it has become increasingly challenging to operate from the current location," Monica Ciriello, the city's director of licensing and bylaw services, said in an email.

City staff are currently assessing the needs of Animal Services and potential future growth plans," she added.

Without being able to expand, the SPCA has relied on patchwork solutions" to solve its space issues, which have become critical," Gerrard told council.

We'll be doing a combination of renovations and new, but those renovations will only happen upon an agreement in place, and so we're kind of in a little bit of a challenge here."

There is some overlap in services, but animal services handles the pound operation and the SPCA has other focuses such as care and education on pet welfare.

Over the years, relations between the city and the SPCA have been rocky at times, including when the municipality moved into adoption services, a shift the charity complained would hurt its bottom line.

Coun. Tom Jackson, who served on the charity's board, recalls a particularly fractious moment came when the city discontinued its annual $1.2-million contribution to the agency in the early 2000s.

With amalgamation still raw," some suburban colleagues balked at funding to support that Taj Mahal" on Dartnall Road, the veteran east Mountain councillor told The Spectator.

But the irony" is, more complaints followed when they learned a new municipal animal control program would add $800,000 to the tab.

As far as I'm concerned," Jackson said, we've got to find a way to get them back to what the original intent of the building and the land was for: exclusively theirs."

But if a financial arrangement is reached, he speculated, the city would have to find a new home for animal services.

So there'll be another conundrum that we've got. You can't just now dissolve the department because the SPCA doesn't want to go."

Teviah Moro is a reporter at The Spectator. tmoro@thespec.com