Work begins on new animal shelter

March 11, 2026 by G. Chambers Williams III

Site preparation is now underway for the new Anderson County Animal Shelter on Carden Farm Drive in Clinton, and the city has issued a building permit in the amount of $4.745 million for the project.

The building permit, listing Place Services Inc. as the contractor, was dated Feb. 25, and calls for a 13,975 square-foot structure.

A grading permit for the five-acre site was issued by the city on Feb. 17.

A crew of workers and several earth-moving machines were on the site Monday morning, grading and leveling the site for the new building.

Construction is expected to take a full year to complete, according to the contract approved by the County Commission in December, County Mayor Terry Frank said.

The new shelter, a pet project of Frank’s, promises to be a state-of-the-art animal-care center that will be positioned to serve the county for decades.

Frank has been working on the project for at least six years, and said she’s glad to see construction finally begin.

It will replace the current shelter on Blockhouse Valley Road that sits on the site of a county waste recycling center.

Architects working on the design of the new facility visited multiple shelters, walking through to see what works and what doesn’t, Frank said.

The County Commission approved the contract for the new shelter Dec. 15 in a 10-5 vote, naming Place Services as the builder, based on its submission of the lowest bid that met the project architect’s requirements.

Voting to block the shelter’s construction were Commissioner Joshua Anderson, who is opposing Frank in the May 5 Republican primary for county mayor, and commissioners Tracy Wandell, Chad McNabb, Shelly Vandagriff and Jerry White. Absent for the vote was Commissioner Sabra Beauchamp.

Anderson and others opposed to the shelter have criticized its cost, and suggested that the county can’t afford it.

Frank and other proponents of the new facility have said the current shelter is woefully inadequate to protect and care for the animals in distress that are brought into the facility.

Frank said the bulk of the money for the project is coming from a low-interest U.S. Department of Agriculture loan, which the county will be able to pay off without raising property taxes.

About a quarter-of-a-mile from Clinton’s Carden Farm Dog Park, the new shelter is being built on land given to the county by the city.

It’s on the east side of Carden Farm Drive on a mostly wooded lot.

Frank said that about 2.6 of the five acres “will be disturbed” to build the shelter, with the rest left mostly intact, including its trees.

“We designed this to be a community center, so it has a very open public space in the front,” Frank said.

“We’ve got an area that’ll kind of be like our PetSmart area in Oak Ridge, with some glass where people can see the cats playing. We’re even planning on a kitty cam.

“We want the adoptable pets to be out there in a place where people can enjoy them, interact with them, and consider adoption,” she said.

“We’ve got adoption rooms, counseling rooms.



“We’ve got a big community room that we intend to hold training classes for folks, whether that’s volunteers or whether that’s animal training, where people come in,” Frank said. “We want it to be a place where the schools are comfortable bringing the students there, interacting.”