With construction costs escalating, Plan B for Mobile Animal Shelter may be old TV studio

MOBILE, Ala. (WALA) - With rising construction costs putting the city’s original proposal for a new animal shelter on hold, Plan B could be a former TV studio.

The Mobile City Council on Tuesday reviewed a proposal to buy a building on the West Interstate 65 Service Road that used to be broadcast station for the religious broadcaster Trinity Broadcasting Network, which closed the Mobile studio in 2019. Council members next week will vote on whether to buy the 5.5-acre property for $855,000.

“The property that’s on the agenda now is centrally located in the city, and it’s just a good value for the city,” said James Barber, Mayor Sandy Stimpson’s chief of staff. “Now, one of the considerations for it is the animal shelter and what it would cost to renovate the property so that we could put the animal shelter there and build the kennels in the back.”

Barber said that would depend on a further cost analysis of renovating the building for use as an animal shelter. He said that could be a cheaper alternative to the city’s original plan of constructing a new facility on Montlimar Drive. The city cleared land for the project but then learned the estimated cost was $20 million – more than double what the city originally had anticipated.

“I think we’ve seen across the country, the escalation in prices has really just caused a lot of people a lot of problems,” he said.

Not everyone is thrilled, though.

“Let’s not unnecessarily cut corners,” said Anna Bush, president of Friends of the Mobile Animal Shelter. “This is something that is so needed and has been promised, and it’s going to matter for a very, very long time.”

Bush said the current animal facility off of Virginia Street is inadequate – old, small and poorly located.

“I’m hopeful they will come up with something suitable,” she told FOX10 News. “However, I do believe that 20 million is not an outrageous number. I think people think that a animal shelter is supposed to be like a pole barn out in the field somewhere. But whereas an animal shelter, in truth, is a hospital; it’s a classroom; it’s a jail, in some cases. It’s a community outreach facility.”

Mobile City Councilman Ben Reynolds, who is sponsoring the resolution to purchase the building on the Beltline, said it is nearly the geographic center of the city.

“It’d be nice to move the animal shelter closer to all the residents of the city, rather than everybody from the west part having to go downtown to an outdated facility,” he said. “So it makes absolute sense, logistically, for an animal shelter to be centrally located in our growing city. … I would imagine it’d have to be heavily modified, but it seems like it’s got plenty of room there.”

Barber said no final decisions have been made about the animal decision, and he added the same goes for the Montilmar Drive property.

“The Montlimar property is still the city’s property,” he said. “It has been, you know, surcharged. And so we’ve prepared it for building, or for sale.”