Our Facilities & History
The Patricia H. Kirwan Center
HART was founded in response to a local problem: the number of homeless animals arriving at the county shelter exceeded its capacity to hold them or funding to shelter them. As a result, most of the 1,000 unclaimed animals were euthanized every year. HART’s goal was to stop the euthanasia of healthy animals by transporting them to larger rescue groups in more populated areas, where they would have a better chance of being adopted. The first year for which reliable statistics have been compiled and recorded was 2004, the first full year of HART’s rescuing activities.
Construction of the Patricia H. Kirwan Center was completed in 2016 at a cost of $3.5M, creating 38 new permanent jobs for the county. The first part of the HART Center, which contained the Bredel Veterinary Clinic, the Bed ‘n Bark Inn, and MuttWorks Grooming, was completed in 2014. The construction of the largest section of the Center, the Adoption Wing, was completed in April 2016. The Adoption Wing has the capacity to house 100 cats and dogs. HART for Animals relies heavily on our innovative model to sustain its strategic goals now and into the future.
