The Brandywine Valley SPCA has broken ground at its new location on Churchmans Road in New Castle.
The new facility will be named the Copeland Center for Animal Welfare to honor longtime advocate for animals in need Tatiana Copeland. She provided a major gift to help make the center possible.
The Copeland Center will be nearly 20,000 square feet including the already over 12,000 square foot facility. It will replace the current New Castle Campus.
The Brandywine Valley SPCA’s Linda Torelli explains how this shelter will differ from others in the region, and how it will help their organization and animals in the area.
"The largest by square footage but even more important than that it's going to have features that no other shelter in the area would have right now," said Torelli. "The top feature we're really excited about is the Intensive Care Unit. Having an ICU for shelter animals is going to increase the quality of care. It's also going to save us quite a bit of money and outsourcing to private vets so that we can put that money back into helping our animals."
The shelter will also double the BVSPCA’s capacity to treat and spay/neuter family pets while also improving the housing and quality of life for shelter animals waiting to be adopted.
The building already there was the Veterinary Specialty Center of Delaware, and the BVSPCA purchased it late last year.
Torelli says that will be renovated, and there will be an addition to the existing structure.
"Essentially rebuild a lot of the inside of that to meet our needs for a low cost spay/neuter clinic for the ICU that we're going to run, but we were able to tap into some of the heritage for that site," Torelli said. "Then on top of that we're adding a state-of-the-art animal shelter that's going to be built from scratch directly attached to that building."
The new facility is expected to open in the spring of 2022.
