CM Wong on animal care center displacement and adoption promotion

Final question.

Thank you.

Thank you.

In the budget over here, it says that highlights of the 27-34 year plan, you're going to have a new animal care center in the Bronx, upgrades to the animal care center in Brooklyn, and other animal welfare investments.

Now, the Queens Animal Center opened on August 1st.

23rd, 2024.

Looks great, 50,000 square feet.

Beautiful.

The problem was the Brooklyn Center was closed within the same week and all the Brooklyn animals moved into Queens.

I know because the Queens Animal Care Center is within walking distance from my district office.

And what happened, the Queens animal got displaced.

And they became the victims, and many of them were sent away or even euthanized.

So what I would like to know is, do you have a plan?

Because if you're going to build, say, the Browns one, the Brooklyn animals,

is going to, the Bronx animals will move to Brooklyn when that's finished.

And then all this is going to happen again.

All right, so my question is, do you have a plan B on what to do with the animals while these animal centers are being renovated, rather than just push it into the other boroughs?

That's my question.

Yeah.

It's a really good question.

So first of all, we have had an increase in our budget specifically for animal control.

Number two, as you've talked about, we have the Bronx shelter that's going to be opening in 27 and the Brooklyn renovation, which is becoming in the end of 2027.

We are certainly aware of the increased surge in the capacity here.

I'm going to pass it over to Deputy Commissioner Corinne Schiff to share a little bit more here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And then the Queens Animal Care Center is, as you say, a beautiful state-of-the-art facility.

When we opened that facility, we were able to actually align the...

Full renovation of the Brooklyn site at the same time as we were opening up the Queens site.

And what that let us do is move more rapidly to finish the Brooklyn site.

And what we had been concerned about is the alternative was to be building the, doing the renovation at the Brooklyn site while staging those renovations.

So the animals and the staff would have to be on site.

That was going to slow us down, but it was also going to leave the animals and

and the staff in a, essentially in a construction zone, which would have been very stressful for the animals.

So we managed to align the two projects and we moved the animals that were in Brooklyn to the Queens Animal Care Center before it opened.

That let us keep status quo, the number of full-service shelters that we had operating in New York City, as the commissioner just said, and as

the chair had mentioned, we will be opening a full-service shelter for the first time in the Bronx, and we will be opening a full-service shelter in Brooklyn.

That's going to expand our capacity across the city.

My final comment is that there's room for improvement on animal adoption because what I see is that if we can do better on that, then far fewer animals will get euthanized.

And I get calls every other day, you know, animal XYZ is going to get euthanized.

So what are you doing to promote adoption?

And I cannot answer them because we do not, I'm not the one that's planning them.

And let me just say that.

The animal care centers, there were no animals euthanized with respect to the move from Brooklyn to Queens.

Animals are not euthanized for space.

We do have animals available for adoption.

We also have a facility in Manhattan that is solely dedicated to animal adoption.

There are wonderful animals available for adoption from animal care centers.

We welcome your helping us to get out the word about adopting from ACC, fostering from ACC.

So those are New York City's animals, and we welcome your support in getting the word out to New Yorkers.

Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you.