City to pay $2M for Cary Street building for new pet adoption center

The vacant building at 2310 W. Cary St. is planned to house a new pet adoption center for Richmond Animal Care & Control. (Jonathan Spiers photo)

Overcrowding at Richmond’s animal shelter in Northside is prompting the city to expand its animal control and pet adoption operations to the Fan.

The city plans to purchase a vacant building at 2310 W. Cary St. for a new pet adoption center that would supplement Richmond Animal Care & Control’s current facility at 1600 Chamberlayne Ave.

The city plans to pay $2 million for the building, which is listed for sale, using funds that had been allocated but are no longer needed for an improvement project for Commerce Road, according to a city memo about the plan.

The funds were appropriated from general obligation bonds assigned to the city’s capital improvement plan, but the Virginia Department of Transportation has since decreased the amount of local funding needed for the project, allowing for the $2 million to be reallocated for other projects.

A set of ordinances to allow the reallocation and purchase were introduced at City Council’s meeting last week. It goes to the Planning Commission for initial consideration Tuesday before council will make a final decision.

The memo that accompanies the resolution states that operations have outgrown the current, 15,000-square-foot facility, which was gifted to the city in 2005 by the Richmond SPCA when they moved to a bigger space on Hermitage Road.

The facility at 1600 Chamberlayne Ave. (BizSense file)

The city spent $2.5 million to renovate the facility a decade ago, adding 4,000 square feet to expand and update the center’s dog kennels, among other improvements.

But the 55-year-old building is no longer considered adequate to accommodate all of the division’s operations, according to the memo, and a lack of isolation space for sick or contagious large dogs has resulted in violations from the state veterinarian that required retrofitting spaces to make them compliant and to accommodate the growing number of animals at the center.

The memo states that the Northside facility has a 15-year maintenance need of $1.5 million.

The Cary Street building, which previously housed an art gallery and was renovated in 2008, totals 10,500 square feet. The city’s purchase would include an adjacent warehouse at 2311 Herbert Hamlet Alley.

The roughly quarter-acre property is owned by Car Studios Associates LLC, which purchased it in 2007 for $800,000. The buildings are listed by Jim Brooks with Town & Country Sales and Management and Barry Hofheimer with Colliers, with an asking price of $2.11 million. The city has assessed the two parcels at about $1.5 million.

The location would primarily serve as a new pet adoption center, while the Chamberlayne space would be used for other services and potentially as a free or low-cost vet clinic and boarding facility. Additional costs are expected to improve the Cary Street building and site, which the memo states would help revitalize perceived blight along that stretch of Cary.

The ordinances would declare a public necessity for the property acquisition and reallocate the $2 million in funds. City Council expects to hold a public hearing on the items at its Oct. 15 meeting.

The project would add to other city investments along that stretch of Cary Street. A few doors east, construction is underway on the new Fire Station 12 at Cary and Addison Street.