No new shelter for St. Louis

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2010:

ST. LOUIS–Losing patience with seven years of faltering
efforts to raise funds to build a new city pound, St. Louis mayor
Francis Slay in March 2010 ordered the closure by summer of the
current pound, built in 1941, and directed the city health
department to find an outside pound contractor.
Plans were afoot in 1995-1996 for St. Louis animal control to
take over a shelter built by the Humane Society of Missouri in 1965
and expanded in 1981, after the humane society completed an $11
million new shelter across the street. The new Humane Society of
Missouri shelter opened in 1998, but by then the city had lost
interest in the old facilities.

Former St. Louis Board of Aldermen president Jim Shrewsbury
in 2002 created a municipal fund supported by public donations that
by March 2010 had raised just $245,000, according to Jake Wagman of
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Shrewsbury also formed the Animal House Fund, a nonprofit
umbrella for fundraising to build a new shelter. Headed since 2005
by former Humane Society of Missouri board chair Ed Throop, 60,
the Animal House Fund raised $265,447 in Throop’s first year, but
lost $42,000 in 2006, lost $14,000 in 2007, and lost $65,000 in
2008.
“Animal House has raised more than $600,000 since 2004,”
wrote Wagman, “but at the end of 2008 had only $107,870 in the
bank–far short of its $4 million goal.”
“The big donations we were getting were in the form of
pledges,” Animal House Fund board member Kate Ewing told Wagman.
“That’s not actually like a pile of cash.”
Throop told Wagman that he had personally pledged $500,000 to
the new shelter project, and that other donors had also made
significant pledges
The three most recent Animal House filings of IRS Form 990
showed no program spending.