LEONARDTOWN — St. Mary’s County’s animal shelter pays an outside hospital an hour away between $131 and $371 every time it needs a dog spayed or neutered. Its new full-time veterinarian says she can do the same surgery in-house for about $40, if the county first rebuilds a storage room into a surgical suite.
Dr. Sara Mikeska laid out the plan to the Animal Control Advisory Board on Nov. 4, describing a project she said would “start paying for itself like immediately” but that has no construction timeline, no contractor quote and no identified budget line yet for the building work.
“The easiest part of this whole thing is the surgeon. That’s me,” Mikeska told the board. “We wouldn’t be able to make this program go any further if we didn’t have someone here that was full time with the capability of doing the surgery.”
How the county got here
Mikeska, a high-volume spay-neuter specialist, joined the shelter part time in the fall of 2025, working about 20 hours a week. Residents pushed for a full-time position at budget hearings this spring, and the position was funded full time, a change Mikeska thanked the board and advocates for on Nov. 4. The county’s Animal Adoption and Resource Center, which opened in 2022 after St. Mary’s left the Tri-County Animal Shelter in Hughesville, has sent its animals to a contracted hospital for sterilization ever since.
That arrangement is expensive. By Mikeska’s figures, the shelter is charged $72 to $82 per cat at the outside hospital against an in-house cost of about $25, and $131 to $371 per dog against about $40. The trip is at least an hour each way, which ties up staff and stresses animals. A single in-house surgeon, she said, should also mean fewer complications because materials, technique and post-operative care would be consistent.
What has to happen first
The shelter was built without a dedicated medical space. The current “tech room,” Mikeska said, is “basically a glorified storage room” with no water. Other rooms were considered, but each would have displaced another function.
The plan is to split that room into three with permanent walls, because the state veterinary board does not accept temporary dividers as surfaces that can be disinfected. The work would include:
- Plumbing for a scrub sink for hand-washing, cleaning and surgical prep.
- Ceiling reinforcement above the drop ceiling to carry a heavy surgical light.
- Non-porous wall panels in surgical areas in place of drywall.
- Cabinetry for supplies, instruments and surgery packs.
Then comes the equipment. Mikeska listed anesthesia machines with built-in oxygen generators, which pull oxygen from room air and avoid the tanks, tubing and supply contracts a traditional setup requires; an autoclave to sterilize instruments; the surgical light; and the sink. She put the one-time machinery cost at more than $25,000. The shelter already owns surgical tables.
Animal Services Division Manager Hollis Lampe said the shelter budgeted for equipment this fiscal year in anticipation of landing a full-time vet, and would buy the pieces that need maintenance, the anesthesia machines and autoclave, from its medical budget. Board Chairman Doug Isleib said AROO, the nonprofit he founded that the county commissioners formalized as a shelter partner in January, would buy the light, cabinets and holding pens. “Equipment-wise, I think we’re good once we have a place to put it,” he said.
The room is the holdup. “The changes to the building are kind of the long pole in the tent,” Lampe said. The first step is a contractor’s line-item quote, arranged through the county’s building services staff, and then a decision on where in the budget the money comes from. Pressed by a board member, Lampe confirmed there is no timeline.
Once built and equipped, the suite must pass a Maryland State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners inspection before any surgery is performed. The board issues a certificate that must be renewed annually, with random inspections every few years. “Just because we’re a shelter doesn’t mean that anything has to be lower quality or different,” Mikeska said.
Thirty animals a day
Mikeska said she averages about 30 spay-neuter surgeries a day, dogs and cats of both sexes, and would likely start at two or three surgery days a week, including feral cats for the shelter’s trap-neuter-return program. Rabbits would be added.
Beyond sterilization, she listed hernia repairs, most eye surgeries including eye removal, mass and tumor removal, limb and digit amputation and abdominal surgery, including removing swallowed objects. She said she has seen dogs surrendered for owner-requested euthanasia whose only problem was a foreign body she could have removed. Broken bones would still go elsewhere; she does not plan to offer orthopedic repair. Dental cleaning and extractions would require a dental station costing at least $8,000 more, which she called a goal but not a first priority.
Staffing would come from existing technicians trained by Mikeska, who said she would do much of the technician work herself at first. The shelter is hiring one technician now and hopes to land a candidate with private-practice surgical experience.
Lampe said the long-term goal is surrender prevention: using the surgical capacity to keep owned pets out of the shelter when a family faces a bill it cannot pay, such as a dog that has eaten socks and needs an obstruction removed. That work could not be done “on the county’s dime,” she said, but Maryland Department of Agriculture grants exist for owned pets needing medical care, and the shelter is already accepting a state agriculture grant for feral cat sterilization. She said staff would look at applying.
The Animal Control Advisory Board next meets in early 2027; the shelter posts its monthly statistics and board minutes on the county’s animal shelter page.
