“I’m looking forward to my mother as an angel walking the halls and telling the cats and dogs that they are safe now.” Over the decades, it was Post who spearheaded various fundraising campaigns to improve the building, and it was Elly Monfett, executive director of the shelter, who founded the Welfare Fund in 2018, with the assistance of Adele Zinderman, to maintain its services. The old shelter that’s being replaced was founded and long shepherded by Zinderman’s mother, Marie Post, and the new one will be named after her.
Post, who died in 2015 at the age of 91, was the consummate community volunteer. She served more than a decade on the Saugerties Town Board, was very active in the Blue Mountain Reformed Church, helped secure shelter for the homeless and domestic violence victims and generally pitched in wherever people in her community needed help. But her main priority was helping abandoned animals.
Working at a veterinary clinic, Post was assigned as the Town Board’s liaison to the animal control officer, who kept stray dogs caged up at the Saugerties Transfer Station. Converting an equipment shed on the site into a full-fledged shelter, for cats as well as dogs, became her life’s work. Over the decades, it was Post who spearheaded various fundraising campaigns to improve the building, and it was she who founded the Animal Welfare Fund in 1999 to maintain its services. “My mother gave her whole soul and her whole heart, not only to the Animal Shelter, but also to the community,” Linderman said.
It has been clear for a long time that the existing shelter – an uninsulated concrete-block structure with a host of space and maintenance issues – was only a stopgap measure, so plans have been in the works for years now to erect a brand-new building that would be comfortable and convenient for animals, staff and adopters alike. For one thing, it needed to have a separate entrance from Route 212, so that the shelter could be open outside of Transfer Station hours. The new site is located on town property behind the Transfer Station, in a peaceful pine grove that will insulate the shelter’s residents from the view, noise and odors of trash being tipped into dumpsters.
The grand plan for the new shelter, as first designed prior to the pandemic, ended up having to be scaled back from two stories to one. “We went out to bid with a more ambitious building, having made our initial price estimates before COVID. When the bids came in, they were well above our budget,” explained project designer Laura Cassar of Zivkovic Connolly Architects.
To save money on subcontractor markups, which can add 20 to 25 percent to the costs of a building project, the organizers switched from a civil/structural engineering model, which requires many aspects of the actual construction to be bid out, to a design/build project, in which all phases of work are kept in-house. The construction management firm Marlboro Group International (MGI) – whose founder Tony Pagano, according to Linderman, “does rescues around the world” and attended the groundbreaking event accompanied by a rescue dog from Puerto Rico – was brought on board both to tweak the design and complete the project.
Architect Cassar seemed pleased with the compromise, noting, “Anything on the second story got incorporated in the first. We tried to keep a lot of the same elements. Everything programmatically is the same.” She described the design of the building’s interior furnishings as “almost medical-grade,” with segregated spaces and separate entrances for animal intake and quarantine, closed-off rooms for food preparation and grooming and other features that will vastly improve the health, safety and comfort of animals cared for at the facility, while making it possible for staff to fulfill their duties at a much more professional level.
Heating for the new building will be supplied through radiant wiring embedded in the concrete floors, which will be easy to sanitize. There will be ample kennel space for dogs, with adjacent runs for exercise, and additional “featured dog rooms.” Cats will have one large room for “condos,” an exterior “catio” and an interior group room that will adjoin a two-story climbing tree behind glass facing the main lobby. Cats and dogs will have separate “meet and greet” rooms where prospective adopters can test their compatibility, both with the humans and their existing pets.
A Community Room will be available for rental for meetings, parties and events. For staff there will be private office space and a lounge, plus space dedicated to storage. Right next to the main entrance will be a Wildlife Room where injured animals can be dropped off to await the arrival of a rehabilitator.
All these upgrades will prove timely when new legislation goes into effect requiring the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets to perform regular inspections of municipal animal shelters, according to Libby Post, executive director of the New York State Animal Protection Federation, who spoke at the event. Post praised state senator Michelle Hinchey for her help in securing a $500,000 state grant toward the Saugerties Animal Shelter construction project, calling her “definitely an ally” in her role as chair of the State Senate’s Agriculture Committee.
Hinchey spoke of animal rescue efforts as “one of the things that show us what community is and ought to be.” She shared a heartwarming anecdote about her own experience rescuing a dog who turned out to have both the same name and same birthday as her father, the late congressman Maurice Hinchey.
Other public officials on hand to speak at the ceremony were Town of Saugerties supervisor Fred Costello, 103rd Assembly District representative Sarahana Shrestha and her redistricted predecessor Chris Tague, all of whom worked to raise funds for the shelter project. “Literally the first thing Chris said to me when we were in Albany was, ‘I need to talk to you about the Saugerties Animal Shelter,’” Shrestha recalled.
Both Shrestha and Post emphasized the growing need for housing for animals abandoned for financial reasons, especially since COVID. “All the shelters are packed to the brim,” Post said. “People are giving up their animals because they can’t afford them. There’s also a shortage of veterinary care.”
“Pets are more insecure now because of economic conditions,” Shrestha agreed. “It’s a holistic problem. We have to make sure communities are stable.”
According to George Salinovich, regional director at MGI, actual site work for the new building will commence before the end of October. The team’s goal is to complete the foundation and all underground work, including utility services, before winter ends the building season. Salinovich projected late October 2025 as the earliest feasible date for the ribbon-cutting for the new facility to take place.
If all goes well, the homeless pets of Saugerties and surrounding towns will have a safe, clean, warm and cozy place to spend the winter of 2025/26, while they wait for their new owners to come and claim them. “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” said Adele Zinderman, quoting Mahatma Gandhi. “The shelters are full, so think about adopting now.”
To learn more about the Saugerties Animal Shelter, how you can find your next furry friend or donate to help pay for the new building, visit www.saugertiesanimalshelter.com. The Shelter is located at 1765 Route 212, near the intersection with Adams Road, between Saugerties and Woodstock.
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