Rochester's new director of Animal Services is hosting a town hall-style meeting this week to answer questions about the city's Verona Street shelter.
For years, animal rights activists and even city officials have described the facility as undersized, underfunded and outdated, even though it regularly passes state inspections.
Staci Papadoplos started as director in August, nearly a year after longtime director Chris Fitzgerald took medical leave and later resigned. She said she spoke to him before accepting the position and would never have taken this on if she thought the shelter's problems were insurmountable.
The level of entrenched criticism has been surprising, Papadoplos said, but she insists the shelter continues to function well, despite its challenges.

"I don't know how to get the community to see that," she said, "because the community has been so spun up for so many years that even when I came in here, I was here for two months and they were like, 'She's doing a terrible job. She's got to go.' "
Papadoplos said she tries to personally respond to emails and phone calls from people demanding answers about the welfare of dogs and cats in the shelter system, even when their tone is confrontational. The town hall is another effort to change perceptions.
The town hall is scheduled for 6 to 7 p.m. Feb. 5 at the Tay House Lodge, 85 Hillside Ave. Papadoplos plans to answer submitted questions that will be accepted when people arrive.
Building strong relationships, she said, enables shelter staff to fine-tune their efforts to foster or adopt animals, helping to better manage the shelter population and ultimately resulting in better outcomes.
"Who's going to pull on whose heartstrings, whose interest is this particular animal going to hit, who's going to want this animal immediately?" she said, describing the targeted versus blanket approach to finding shelter animals a home.
Another priority is the creation of an isolation area to separate animals with infectious illnesses from the general shelter population. All shelters in New York will have to meet this requirement to satisfy state regulations that take effect in December.
Plans also are underway to install new floor drains inside each kennel to minimize the spread of illnesses. These are the new director’s updates to renovations that were already planned before her arrival on Aug. 19, 2024.
Since she started as director, Papadoplos said city's live release rate — the percentage of animals that were adopted or transferred to rescue groups - rose from 85% to 91%.
Many in the community have been calling for a new shelter, which could come with a more than $37 million price tag, according to a 2022 architect's report. While Papadoplos said she would also welcome a state-of-the-art facility, she appears to be focused on making the best of what's there now.
"I'm used to working in small shelters with limited resources and huge shelters with many resources. There's nothing that we can't make work here," she said. "We're doing it."
Brian Sharp and Jasmin Singer contributed to this story.