LONG BEACH, NY — The Long Beach Animal Shelter will continue being run by Posh Pets and get a series of HVAC improvements after the Long Beach City Council approved a pair of resolutions at Tuesday night's meeting.
Operated by Posh Pets since 2014, City Manager Dan Creighton said the shelter's annual operating budget is about $700,000, more than three times the cost the city will pay to contract the service out to Posh Pets.
The contract with Posh Pets will run for five years, with an option to renew the contract for three two-year periods after the initial five years are up. Under the contract, the city would pay $200,000 annually to Posh Pets for its services.
At Tuesday night's meeting, Long Beach DPW Deputy Commissioner Steve Friedman called the animal shelter facility a "24/7, 365-occupied facility," not only by staff but by the animals sheltered there. That occupancy, the deputy commissioner said, makes designing around an occupied space complicated.
"They've got about eight individual split systems there that are very antiquated, we're spending a tremendous amount of money repairing them," Friedman said. "When the repairs have to happen, the systems go down…another factor is the poor ventilation, which we got cited [for] by the Nassau County Department of Health."
The effort to improve the ventilation in the shelter, Friedman said, "snowballed" after PSEG determined that the building's incoming electrical service was insufficient to meet its needs. While PSEG is upgrading the service to the building at no cost, Friedman said the city would have to foot the bill to upgrade the electric distribution on-site.
As for the split systems, Friedman said the existing systems don't bring outside air into the space, but rather that they recirculate air through the building. Per code for animal shelters, Friedman said the city needs to provide a sufficient amount of air circulation with outside air coming into the space.
Much of the equipment for the HVAC updates, Friedman said, would be placed on the roof of the facility.
While the city has a grant to cover $225,000 of work on the shelter's HVAC system, Creighton said, "The scope [of the work] exceeds that grant."
The city batch approved each of the items on its agenda, including the two animal shelter items, at the end of its meeting Tuesday night.
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