AnimalSave, a nonprofit animal-welfare organization, has announced in a letter to The Union that it will not build the no-kill shelter it had been planning to establish for the past eight years.

Emily Snelling, executive director of AnimalSave, said Monday the project is not "feasible at this time ... largely due to AnimalSave's stage of organizational development."

Snelling emphasized AnimalSave was not scrapping the shelter project entirely but is trying to determine the present needs of the community.

Diana Bailey, board president of AnimalSave, agreed with Snelling.

"What we are doing is that we are re-grouping, looking at our structure," she said. "We are going to do strategic planning. We have lots of ideas with the property. It's not that we will not build the structure. We haven't abandoned the idea at all. We need to find out what the community needs are at this point."

When AnimalSave was founded in 1998, more than 60 percent of homeless animals were being euthanized for lack of space, Snelling said. But over the years, that number has been reduced drastically.

There is also the issue of gathering $1.4 million dollars for the project.

"We weren't raising enough money," Snelling said. "But we realized, there was a reason why we weren't raising money and that was because we need to build out internal capacity to support a large scale project and we have already started taking the steps to build that capacity."

So far, $648,000 has been raised through grants, individual donors, special occasion revenues and a raffle, Snelling said. From that amount, $320,000 has been spent on architectural fees, engineering fees, a feasibility study, licenses and permits, sight-development and miscellaneous expenses.

On July 22, 2005, AnimalSave held a groundbreaking ceremony on the 8.5 acres of donated land where the shelter was supposed to be built. Bailey said it was premature for AnimalSave to hold that ceremony, but the organization was responding to public pressure at the time.

"The board still feels that we will build some kind of animal shelter but what it (will) actually look like is something we need to decide through strategic planning with our partners and supporters," Bailey said.

Snelling said AnimalSave should reach a decision within the next six months. A part of the planning process will include asking donors how they want their money to be used.

"One of the questions we will be looking into is what are some of the things that we can do immediately with the resources we have right now," Snelling said. "Because we have stopped the project now, it is our ethical duty to ask the donors what they want to do with their money and we are finding that most people want to keep the money in trust for future building.

"We have hit a point where we know it (the shelter-building project) will not happen as planned and as scheduled. It would be wiser for us to build the capacity to do a major fundraising and to engage in strategic planning and become a more solidly professional organization."

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To contact staff writer Soumitro Sen, e-mail soumitros@ theunion.com or call 477-4229.