Olathe mall closure puts no-kill cat shelter in a bind

When Metcalf South closed last year, cat shelter Purrfect Pets lost its home of 11 years. The shelter moved into the Great Mall of the Great Plains — only to be told five months later that the mall was closing, effective this summer.

The no-kill shelter must vacate the mall by June but currently has nowhere to go.

The problem is mostly financial. When the shelter moved into its current location, Purrfect Pets founder Elaine Doran said mall management did not tell organizers that closure was imminent, and Purrfect Pets spent $12,000 upgrading the space and customizing to fit its needs.

“We felt like we were really blindsided here, because we were allowed to move in and do all the work. We should not have been able to build all this if they knew they were closing,” Doran said.

Now, Doran said, they’re stuck with a hole in the budget. An online petition is circulating, asking the mall’s owner, VanTrust Real Estate, to “reimburse Purrfect Pets for the money they spent to renovate, since the company allowed the nonprofit to move in and spend their limited funds on refurbishments, only to push them back out.”

As of Thursday, the petition had garnered more than 63,000 signatures.

However, a representative from VanTrust Real Estate said Purrfect Pets had fair warning not to invest the money in their space.

“When we were contacted by them as a possible tenant the general manager who met with them (Mark Levin of the Great Mall) to put the deal together, purposely told them … the lease that they signed is a month to month lease,” said Jeff Smith, vice president of asset management for VanTrust Real Estate. “At the time, also we told them to not put a lot of improvements into the space, because we were not sure at the time what we would be doing in the future to the center.”

Smith said that all of the lease deals the company has made at the Great Mall in the last year have been month to month leases and that Purrfect Pets was “not treated any differently than anyone else” at the mall.

Doran said that her lease at the Great Mall was not a month-to-month lease but was a one-year lease, from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015.

“We knew the mall’s future was uncertain” but didn’t expect it to close so soon, she said.

Doran has always had a fondness for cats.

“Ever since I was a little girl, I always had a passion and love for cats and kittens,” she said.

Before she started Purrfect Pets, she cared for a community of feral cats in Shawnee. In 2001, she got her shelter license, and since 2003, she has helped about 3,500 cats through the shelter, she estimates.

Right now, 30 cats and kittens are in residence at Purrfect Pets, and organizers are trying not to take on many more because of the uncertainty about their future.

Inside the shelter, there are group rooms where three to five cats share a common space. Very often, the animals have at least one sibling with them. Penelope and Zeus are brother and sister and stay with another cat in one of the rooms.

There’s also a dedicated room for kittens where black and white balls of energy Mason, Rose and Diamond live. Having this separate space was something Doran had wanted for years, for the health of the kittens.

Doran said she doesn’t know if they’ll be able to get another space as big as this one for a rent they can afford.

The shelter is staffed completely by volunteers. Individuals also volunteer to give a cat a foster home until it can be adopted.

One of the fostering volunteers is Donna Warshaw of Overland Park. She estimates that in the eight years she’s been a volunteer, she’s had about 200 foster cats come through her home. Two of them became part of her family.

A shelter environment can be “stressful for them,” Warshaw said. Fostering “kind of gives them a break.”

With adult cats, she takes them in during the week, then brings them back to Purrfect Pets on its busiest days so the cats can be exposed to potential adoptive families.

The shelter has a guarantee that if the cat does not work out with a family, they will take it back. When that happens, it’s usually because of allergies or trouble integrating with current family pets.

“They try to make the best situation for the cat and for the humans,” Warshaw said. Purrfect Pets tries to make sure that people “don’t just adopt a cat for the color but for the personality.”

Warshaw said she was disappointed and “teary-eyed” when she heard about the upcoming move for the shelter. She helped paint the walls of the current location during renovations last summer.

The shelter is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. It’s trying to combat its funding shortage through a donation page at www.gofundme.com/purrfectpets and through various local fund-raiser events.

This story was originally published April 21, 2015 at 9:33 PM with the headline "Olathe mall closure puts no-kill cat shelter in a bind."