Circle of Friends Animal Shelter 'still here,' chief operating officer stresses

Feb. 16—GRAND FORKS — Rachael Murphy would like everyone to know that Circle of Friends is very much still in operation.

"We're still here, we're still adopting and we need people to adopt," said Murphy, the nonprofit's chief operating officer.

After Circle of Friends moved to vacate its Adoption Center at 910 S Washington St. late last month, which included a largely successful blitz to adopt many of the animals housed at that location, some people came away convinced the nonprofit was going away for good.

But Murphy stresses that's not the case, especially since steady and swift adoptions are key to keeping the nonprofit going as it attempts to navigate to a stable financial future.

The Circle of Friends of today isn't the same pedigree shelter that months ago touted its premium animal care, 24/7 on-call veterinarian and staff to support both.

Since revealing its financial difficulties Jan. 5

, the nonprofit has laid off most of its staff,

terminated its executive director

and veterinarian, and closed one of its two facilities in a bid to return to solvency and to maintain its status as the city pound.

Murphy, a 16-year-veteran of Circle of Friends, is now charged with running an organization that looks drastically different than just a few weeks ago.

As of Monday, Feb. 12, there were just 11 animals — eight cats and three dogs — housed in its Medical Center at 4375 N Washington St., the product of a so-far-successful strategy to get strays out the door faster by posting them online as potential adoptions before a city-mandated four-day hold ends. (The pet's owner gets first priority, obviously, so long as they reach out to Circle of Friends before the hold is up.)

"The key to this is our length of stay has to be five days," Murphy said. "We need to get them out."

An onsite shower for employees is now packed with empty kennels brought from the Adoption Center; so is an isolation room for animals with infectious diseases like rabies.

The southwest corner of the building, the medical suite into which Circle of Friends poured three-quarters of a million dollars over three years, is mostly quiet.

The nonprofit is cutting costs wherever it can — selling excess cages and cat playpens from the Adoption Center, cutting its share of employee insurance premiums, negotiating six months of interest-only payments on the $600,000 mortgage the board voted to take out on the Medical Center — but the medical suite is staying untouched for now.

"It's going to stay as is as far as I'm concerned right now," Murphy said.

Circle of Friends calculated it cost the shelter $50 per day, per boarded animal, in documents presented to Grand Forks City Council in January. Murphy estimated the shelter now spends about $23 per day, per animal, though that's come at the expense of animal enrichment and more than a dozen people's jobs.

Four full-time employees, including Murphy, are charged with running the shelter and providing care to the animals. It is the smallest staff Murphy has seen in the decade and a half she's worked for Circle of Friends.

"I would say this is probably the biggest step backward we've ever had," Murphy said.

Volunteers, including some of the 11 staff who were laid off last month, come in here and there to play with the dogs and cats and to help out.

Cassi Vincent, who started at Circle of Friends in October, has been coming to the medical center a couple of times a week since being let go.

"Being here isn't really like work for me," she said. "It's like a second home."

On Monday, she had an afternoon interview scheduled with Kindness Animal Hospital, one of a handful of veterinary clinics operating in Grand Forks.

Several of her former coworkers were looking for work in animal care, she said, including a peer who had an interview for the same job at Kindness scheduled for that morning.

"Everyone's rooting for each other," Vincent said. "It's just an odd scenario."

The new frugality appears to be paying off. The shelter's cost-savings, plus some $35,000 in fundraising from last week's Giving Hearts Day, means Circle of Friends was able to make its under-$29,000 payroll on Friday, Chief Financial Officer Judi Marvin said. That paid out the last of the unpaid overtime former staff had accrued.

But there are some costs that remain outside Circle of Friends' control. Three former staff members have applied for unemployment benefits, costs Circle of Friends will have to eventually cover since it opted out of paying the state's unemployment insurance tax.

Board member Mitch Price is working to remove an outside air HVAC system — which cost more than $100,000 — at the Adoption Center, but says it's likely too specialized an item to sell easily or use elsewhere.

And even though Circle of Friends emptied the Adoption Center weeks ago under the presumption that its landlords would forgive breaking the lease on the South Washington Street address, Marvin sent a check for $4,803 to Blue Star Management earlier this month — a full month's rent. Circle of Friends also continues to pay monthly utility costs.

Marvin said she had a "positive conversation" about being let out of the lease with a Blue Star representative on Jan. 26, two days after the board of directors voted to vacate the building, but hasn't heard from him since.

Acting CEO Chris Douthit said he also reached out to the management company, but hadn't heard back as of Thursday.

An email to the Blue Star representative from the Herald went unanswered as of Friday morning.

Despite the shelter's efforts, some animals have remained past the four-day hold mandated by the city and the five days Circle of Friends wants to keep them.

One cat named Mac spent more than a month in the shelter after being brought in Jan. 5, the day Circle of Friends first went public when its financial difficulties. He came in with a prolapsed rectum, which the shelter's now-departed veterinarian, Dr. Taylor Biermaier, treated, and was adopted earlier this week.

Murphy, who can remember when Circle of Friends routinely euthanized pets for space years ago, is adamant the nonprofit will not return to that practice.

"If it ever got to that point, everyone who works here would have to take a serious look at themselves and say, 'Is this something we're going to be able to do?" Murphy said. "And the answer is 'no.'"

Murphy also was charged with attempting to find another veterinarian who could take over emergency care as well as routine medical operations for pets, which the city was working on simultaneously.

That appears to have yielded fruit. City Administrator Todd Feland told the Herald the city has a tentative agreement with Kindness Animal Hospital to provide daytime medical care to animals impounded at Circle of Friends. The city also is interested in a joint agreement between Kindness and other vet clinics for after-hours care from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

"I don't know if it's 100% true and I don't want to mess it up, but if I needed help right now, I would call Kindness," Murphy said.

Two other retired veterinarians have volunteered their services to Murphy. The southwest corner of the Medical Center might get some use sooner than later.

"We have a medical suite, we have a surgical suite, and if we can get it in use, that's ideal," Murphy said.