Animal Care Center in Coral approved by CZM

The St. John Coastal Zone Management Commission has approved a major CZM permit that paves the way for the construction of an Animal Care Center facility in Coral Bay.

Michael Milne, with Barefoot Design Group, thanked commission members for the approval during a public hearing Tuesday. “Everybody at the ACC greatly appreciates this,” Milne said of the project that has been “20 years in the making.” The proposed two-story center would be on a 2.3-acre lot in Estate Carolina.

The ACC is a nonprofit, no-kill shelter that annually takes in hundreds of animals, provides spaying or neutering, and feeds and medicates them until they find a home. The shelter currently operates out of a mobile-home structure on rented land across from the library in Cruz Bay and has 10 dog kennels and about 25 cat cages.

“This wooden structure amazingly survived Irma and has been band-aided again and again,” Denise Walker, ACC board president, told The Daily News after the approval. “Our intention is to maintain the tiny Cruz Bay location as a satellite in addition to the Coral Bay location, as long as funds allow.”