Yukon humane society says animal shelter might close due to financial woes
The board of Humane Society Yukon is laying its cards on the table.
The society, which runs the Mae Bachur Animal Shelter in Whitehorse, is dealing with financial troubles, both in the short and long term.
"We're appealing to the community," said Carol Oberg, the board's secretary/treasurer.
"There is a chance it could shut down for sure because you have to be able to pay your staff, you have to be able to pay, you know, to feed the animals, to get the vet care you need."
Katie Malo, the operations manager, said it has unpaid veterinary bills and animals waiting to be spayed or neutered. She said the shelter's policy to get that done before any pet is adopted and in any case the adoption fee does not cover the entire cost of the procedures.
Oberg says the shelter has had a long stretch of financial setbacks. Fundraisers that never made as much money as organizers expected, a lawsuit the shelter won, but cost thousands of dollars in legal fees, higher insurance fees and higher costs for animal feed.
A decision to switch to a do-it-yourself bookkeeping system to save money was a mistake.
Oberg said there were errors in the financial report which led to a legal requirement for a financial review to be done.
The cost of the review is being covered by the territorial government, but in the meantime, the shelter has been cut off from its annual funding from the government.
Oberg says it covers about a quarter of the shelter's roughly $435,000 annual budget.
The board has hired bookkeeper Tanya Van Valkenburg.
Van Valkenburg said the shelter is about $50,000 in debt. It has $18,900 in the bank and as of Tuesday morning had raised $19,500 through an online campaign aiming to raise $35,000.
Oberg said however, paying off the debt won't solve all of its problems. She believes the shelter cannot continue to operate as it has been.
The board has called a public meeting for Nov. 26.
"We're going to the community with this public meeting because we're saying, 'We don't know what to do really,'" said Oberg.
"How are we going to even structure the shelter, can it run like this like is it, is it a good way to run, just this amount of fundraising, maybe there's another model that's needed in the community for this. I don't know."
Board president, Kate Dawson, said the board members are exhausted.
"We're all getting older. Some people have been on the board for a number of years, but we have found that people have been coming and going more," she said.
"So the fact that people are going implies that they're getting tired. They're being asked to do too much."
