Toccoa Humane Shelter Gets Pay Budget Raise

By Ethan Jordan, WNEG Radio, Toccoa

The Stephens County Humane Shelter will get its requested funding for another year.

Jointly funded by the City of Toccoa and Stephens County, both boards voted to kick in half of the requested $321-thousand dollar operating budget.

Stephens County County Administrator Phyllis Ayers presented the their request to the Board of Commissioners at their regular meeting this week.

Both the Toccoa and Stephens County Commissions had voted to cut the shelter’s budget last year, but Ayers explained over the past year, they’ve realized that the Humane Shelter is unable to operate without the requested funds.

“When we made the change to bring a Marshal in that is post certified that person is more expensive than the prior employee that was handling animal control so the city and the county’s joint services committee met and tried to come to some figure to help the humane shelter financially. They are not able to survive financially with the large cut the city and the county both gave. So, we sat around the table and took last year’s adopted budget and subtracted the value of that employee, divided that by two. So, therefore, the city would give 160 thousand and some odd dollars and the county which is a little less than what we were doing in the prior years but that should help,” she said.

Both the County and the City contribute a total of $160,850 each for a total of $321,700.