Stories from the Shelter On To The Next

As I often do with a new year, this January, I find myself reflecting on the last several whirlwind years I have had with Midcoast Humane and thinking about what our future holds. We held a town hall at the Central Lincoln County YMCA on Nov. 21 to discuss exactly that for our Edgecomb campus. The answer to its future is not straightforward and requires community input and participation to determine.

To offer some background, in 2015, due to its financial situation, the Lincoln County Animal Shelter’s board requested to merge with Coastal Humane Society. After a brief management agreement a merger of the nonprofits went forward, forming Midcoast Humane in 2016. The Edgecomb shelter was closed to the public in 2018.

In the intervening years, Midcoast Humane has undergone a great deal of change. The executive director who managed the merger left and two subsequent executive directors have come and gone. The dilapidated Range Road shelter in Brunswick has been replaced by a new facility in a renovated former call center and the entire board of directors has turned over.

I celebrated my third year with Midcoast Humane this past August. I have officially outlasted every executive director for a decade, perhaps longer. I have various theories on why that may be. Perhaps it is because I came to Midcoast with a long animal sheltering career under my belt as opposed to being new to the industry; or perhaps it is because I care so deeply for pets and the people who love them that helping them has become my vocation. It may also come down to a strong element of perseverance in my nature (we’ll call it that instead of sheer stubbornness).

Sheltering is not for the faint of heart or the easily discouraged. Frankly, there are far easier ways to make a living. People who stay in sheltering for more than a year or two are few and far between, much less those who choose it as a career. I chose this career and I chose Midcoast Humane and that means both its campuses and their communities.

At the November town hall, there was some criticism about how the Edgecomb shelter came to be in such sad shape while the Brunswick shelter was replaced. We understand why that would be questioned when faced with the reality of the condition of the Edgecomb shelter. The Brunswick shelter was significantly older and in worse condition than Edgecomb and was therefore replaced first.

Many people attracted to animal sheltering are helpers, people with big hearts who love animals and want to help them. For quite a few of those people, the actual level of need, the unending stream of animals and community members in need is overwhelming and once you add stressors like fundraising and building and vehicle maintenance, etc., it is like trying to drink from a fire hose.

When I started at Midcoast in August 2021, Edgecomb had been closed to the public for four years and Brunswick had not yet reopened to the public from COVID. It took us some time to hire additional staff, as a shelter with open public hours needs more available staff than a closed shelter doing a majority of their admission and adoption counseling via phone. We reopened the Brunswick shelter late in the year for cat and small animal viewing with dogs available to be seen by appointment and opened Edgecomb by appointment for all species.

Why the appointments? The dog kennel area at Brunswick was simply not safe to have members of the public in. Neither is the Edgecomb facility. Edgecomb has kennels added on the side of a house which was built in 1987 as a residence, not as a shelter. We are very hard on structures; there are reasons that most shelters are built out of concrete block, but even concrete needs eventual replacing.

We have addressed the Brunswick facility reaching the end of its service life and now need to deal with the Edgecomb shelter.

Is the timing ideal? No, not at all. Ideally, we’d be able to get some breathing room, pay off the mortgage on the existing new shelter and then tackle another building project after being able to conduct the quiet phase of a capital campaign. However, that is not the situation we are in.

All the cans that both Lincoln County Animal Shelter and Coastal Humane Society kicked down the road stopped being able to be put off around the same time. It took years of deferred maintenance for both facilities to get into their eventual condition. Animal shelter staff are used to working in suboptimal conditions and many shelters across the country are in the same condition as Brunswick was and Edgecomb is now. Money spent on facilities is often seen by the general public as taking money away from the animals, despite the facilities’ whole purpose being to house and support the pets in their care.

Additionally, despite the frequent perception otherwise, animal causes receive very little support when you examine overall philanthropy; we and the environment hold down the bottom tier of donor giving. We are very good at doing the best we can with what we have and carrying on, but there comes a point where that is no longer feasible or reasonable to expect of volunteers, staff or the animals and while the Brunswick shelter reached that point first, the Edgecomb shelter is at that point now.

Another point of concern brought up at the town hall was that we were meeting with our community to discuss the shelter, but did not have a plan ready to go. We are in the community feedback stage that helps dictate what that plan would ultimately look like. We offered examples of four animal shelters built in Maine in the last 10 years, with their square footage, costs, and the programming their shelters offer to give everyone an idea of the range of costs, sizes, and services possible.

If we are unable to garner the support needed to build a new shelter or only limited support necessitating scaled back offerings, then it is best to find out now. Had the general response in the room been indifference or disinterest, that would have been telling, but it was not; the majority of attendees wanted to see an open, thriving animal shelter in Lincoln County.

That is what Midcoast Humane wants for Lincoln County, as well. It is a large county, and its pets and residents need accessible, local services. The next closest shelters are the Brunswick campus of Midcoast Humane and Augusta and Thomaston’s shelters and they are too far to go for many residents to reclaim lost pets, receive low-cost services, etc., not to mention the difficulty for other facilities to absorb the 1,000 animals entering the Edgecomb campus annually.

It is important for me to stress that our Edgecomb shelter is not an afterthought or valued less than the Brunswick campus. We are addressing the organization’s needs as thoughtfully and quickly as we can. My personal perspective is that I hate a closed animal shelter, which is why COVID was so hard for me. A closed shelter is a shelter empty of visitors meaning no adoptions are happening, pets are not being met, our staff isn’t chatting and making relationships with people and we are not enmeshed in our community.

My hope for the Lincoln County branch of Midcoast Humane is all the things I love that have filled my heart and kept me in sheltering for 17 years – a facility full of happy children visiting the shelter on field trips or spending the day with us for summer camp; families being completed with adopted pets; wayward pets being reunited with the families that love them and a low-cost, low-income clinic helping to make sure that all pets receive medical care, regardless of their guardian’s financial capacity. I call this place “Happy Shelterland” when I talk to staff about it and it is my hope for what we can replace the Edgecomb shelter with.

Will we get there? I don’t know, but we are going to try our hardest. The staff, volunteers, pets and community in Lincoln County deserve it.

(Midcoast Humane is one of the biggest animal shelters in Maine, operating facilities in Edgecomb and Brunswick, serving 39 towns throughout the Midcoast. For more information, go to midcoasthumane.org.)