Nine lives: Kitten nursery settles with North Whitehall to continue operation

Even a kitten nursery can have nine lives, and Foxy’s Cradle will now live on after settling a zoning dispute with North Whitehall Township that threatened its work with vulnerable kittens.

The township will classify the nursery as a home business instead of an animal rescue, according to the settlement that the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Monday.

While Foxy’s Cradle originally operated out of owner Kandice Reinert’s home, it will now function as a network of foster homes where volunteers will care for the kittens, per the settlement. Reinert can continue to use her home as an office, but she cannot house cats there either for the nursery or as personal pets.

Reinert only owns dogs as pets, but it’s still a sad capitulation, she said.

“Am I happy about not being able to have a cat in the house again? No,” she said. “No, but it’s something that I had to give up to let the nursery continue to function.”

The North Whitehall Township Zoning Hearing Board ruled against the newborn kitten nursery in December, saying it violated zoning ordinances.

Reinert said she appealed the decision, with her legal team and the township spending the following couple of months working toward the settlement, which led her to eventually withdraw the appeal.

Even before Monday, Reinert said, she had already moved the operation out of her home and that it was otherwise continuing “as normal as possible,” to the point of being stronger than before. She used GoFundMe money to buy a recreational vehicle in January.

“It’s a mobile kitten unit,” she said, clarifying that no kittens are housed in the RV long-term. “We can do all kinds of stuff. We can take our [adoptable kittens] in that unit, and we can hold meet-and-greets anywhere. So it’s allowing us to really have a much stronger outreach program. We can reach a lot [of] other communities than just people coming to our location all the time. We can go anywhere with them, and that’s really working out great.”

The nursery will have to comply with the settlement’s terms by July, which is when it will reach its five-year anniversary.

In other news, the board approved 75 apartments across two projects that the planning commission recommended back in March.

One of those is the second phase of Timberidge Luxury Apartments, for which developer Lee Goldstein wants to build 48 apartment units and garages across four buildings at Levans Road and Route 329. The township approved the first phase’s 72 apartments in August .

The second project, the Views at Fells Creek, would see Jaindl Land Co. build 27 homes at Neffs Laurys Road.

The supervisors approved both projects unanimously with little discussion.

Township Manager Randy Cope said the township will tentatively hold a conditional use hearing for Access Rising Sun Associates LLS at 7 p.m. May 29. The developer is proposing 110 single-family lots at Rising Sun Road.