09/20/2026
🐾 Humane Society Pays Off All $313,000 in Debt in Five Months
NEWTON, N.C. (09/18/2026 10:30 AM) — The Humane Society of Catawba County has paid off all $313,000 in debt it was carrying in April, the shelter announced Friday morning, five months after a new director arrived to find the checking account overdrawn.
The last piece fell into place this week. A vendor waived the interest on the final balance, cutting what the shelter owed from more than $28,000 to $19,258. Executive Director Doug Rae signed the check.
The shelter still carries its mortgage. It no longer carries vendor debt, medical debt or a line of credit.
That line of credit was $100,000 and maxed out. It was erased in June after a woman who had died left the shelter roughly 75 percent of her estate, about $150,000. Rae said a local law office had been trying to reach him for weeks before he learned about it. He made a deposit of $179,522.55, then paid the credit line off at $97,919.58 from his car in the bank parking lot.
Earlier, a donor who read one of his weekly Facebook updates wrote a $50,000 check that wiped out the shelter's entire medical debt.
Rae started April 13. The pay period before he arrived, the shelter had gone more than $5,000 into the negative just to cover payroll. Vendors had cut off medical supply orders. The Hickory Daily Record reported in the spring that some unpaid bills stacked in his office were about two years old. In his first week, Rae wrote that the shelter was "in a fight for its life."
He inherited more than a balance sheet.
Former director Jane Bowers was placed on leave in April 2025 and fired that June after a third-party investigation into complaints of a toxic workplace. Dozens of people rallied in downtown Newton that spring carrying signs calling for the leadership to go, and an online petition drew hundreds of signatures.
Distrust went past the director's office. Residents criticized the board for not releasing financial records or meeting minutes, and the head of the Catawba County United Way wrote in February that his group walked away from an effort to help because the shelter never produced the financials it had promised. The board responded to the criticism saying that internal documents beyond its tax filings are not typically shared publicly.
Then the board hired Rae, and the anger turned toward him. Close to 150 residents signed a petition in March asking the board to reconsider, pointing to his firings from shelters in Indiana and Rhode Island and a 2019 Colorado state inspection that found problems at the shelter he ran there. Rae told The Charlotte Observer those issues were resolved years ago and asked residents to give him a chance. The board said it ran a third-party background check and stood behind the hire. Rae has written that he sat through two three-hour public meetings before his first day, where he was questioned and yelled at.
Since then, appointment-only adoptions ended, adoption fees dropped, and Monday hours returned in June. The shelter adopted out 55 cats and dogs in August. Public hours expand into the early evening on weekdays starting Monday, September 28.
The work is not finished. The mortgage runs $4,171 a month, payroll hits roughly $45,000 every other week, and the 2025 audit and federal tax filing are still outstanding. The shelter is hiring a full-time finance manager, a position funded for one year by a foundation board member who had been reading Rae's updates.
The shelter went from overdrawn to debt-free in five months. What would you want it to focus on next?
