The Humane Society of Yuma recently completed a new facility, raising the initial $1.5 million needed for the project completely through public donations.

The new plans for a county-run kennel come as a result of Yuma County experiencing a significant increase in kenneling costs.

County administrator Robert Pickels believes building a new county-wide facility could reduce costs in the long run.

“My staff and I put together some numbers of what we thought we could build and operate a facility for,” says Pickels. Those numbers turned out to be less, the per day cost was less, than what we are paying per day to the Humane Society.”

Humane Society supporters believe a move like this would waste taxpayer money and possibly send the organization into bankruptcy.

Shawn Smith, the executive director of the Humane Society of Yuma, says building a new county-run facility is unnecessary.

“What we don’t want to see, from a Human Society perspective and from a taxpayers perspective, is a redundancy in service,” he says. If you have a kennel here and another one in a different location, it’s again just duplicating an already existing service, and the Human Society of Yuma is best suited to handle kenneling in the area.”