Dear Friends.
Our New Animal Shelter is on Hold. We cannot give up hope for a better home for those we so dearly care for.. We realize that we cannot remain at our present location because of the continuous flooding, three times just in 2019 alone, and with the limitations imposed by Moline city zoning & building will not allow changes to this building. Plus city’s elected are not willing to get a pump station placed to pump rainwater over the dike when they close that gate in their storm drain. It’s just not a pet friendly facility at this location.
A 2 acre property sight was purchased several years ago to build a new and better shelter, That property is zoned light industrial, and yes as I thought, it is in a flood plain. However; the previous Board members, which most are no longer with us were told that they could obtain a special use permit from zoning, which they did. They were also told that the property for building was above flood elevations.
What they were not told is that there would be very limited use of this 2 acres property, and require a great amount of city required upkeep..Not told that they could only develop less than an acre of the 2 acre site. Not told there would be very costly landscaping requirement, including a buffer yard with special trees, special designer rain gardens, very limited amount of yard space to be left for the animals. The city engineer never said that this lot is the only property in that area that can absolutely have no rain water allowed into city storm drains, nor into the rain ditch located directly behind, but which is used by all those adjacent properties. They did not tell them they have to pay for a city sidewalks that no one will walk on. They did not tell them they had to hire a professional landscaping company. The property had to be completed with trees and sod at a cost of nearly three hundred thousand dollars..
I was asked if I would volunteer to help with the new shelter. I accepted.. But.. After months and several hundred hours working on this, meetings with arrogant administrators in several city departments It was made clear to me that this property is not going to allow for our new shelter. The special use permit requirements now being mandated by the zoning & building department, along with city engineer, Jon Clark’s ever changing requirements , we cannot afford his costs to build on that property in Moline. With all his very costly requirements, the answer is, ” No we cannot afford Moline.”
If only those city administrators would have explained to those board members that there were so many more costly, and very different rules in order for them to build upon that property? . . .
On the advice of a Civil Engineering firm which thought they could work with Jon to make things work, created a site plan (s). She gave me a small amount of hope. But what she failed to make Jon understand is that we need to stay with in budget of the amount of money in our building fund
She submitted her site plans to Jon Clark, city engineer. Those ever changing requirements being mandated by Jon and with building zoning has indeed made it much, much to costly, and totally out of reach. It pushed a simple 3000 square foot building costs well over a million dollars. There could be no expansion of kennels or building. Jon pretty much put the brakes on a shelter in Moline.
This cilvil engineer submitted her invoice to us, and said it would be in our best interest to scrap the idea of ever building an animal shelter on that property.
A good fit for that property would be for more garage storage units, a scrap yard etc.? I had to give up. I accepted defeat. On the advice of the Civil engineer, The Board agreed and have put that property up for sale.
Ken
Our board of directors have placed that property back on the market for Sale. They are keeping a lookout for property located in the county and out of any flood plane.
