Oviedo Mall kennel approved following dramatic public hearing 

Following surprise testimony and a dramatic back-and-forth hearing, a kennel for a non-profit dog rescue organization is officially coming to the Oviedo Mall. 

What was initially expected to be a simple yes vote by the Oviedo City Council to approve a dog kennel turned into confusion and multiple last-minute changes of heart by Council members at its Aug. 17 meeting.  

Save A Life Pet Rescue, Inc., a local non-profit organization, requested permission for the kennel. It has been in operation in Oviedo since 2006, previously doing events outside of the PetSmart on Vidina Place before joining the mall in late 2025.

Save A Life currently operates its pet adoption programs at the mall on Fridays and Saturdays, though that could be extended in the future, and staff there had asked the city to approve an on-site kennel to help with logistics and to reduce stress on the dogs and foster families. Council members were set to approve the request following a public hearing until the CEO of C3 Pathways, the neighboring business in the mall, gave 11th-hour testimony against the kennel due to potential noise issues.

C3 Pathways is an emergency response preparedness organization, and holds trainings and creates media such as podcasts and videos onsite at its mall location, the CEO, Bill Godfrey, a retired fire chief, said. 

“The pet rescue center, which does great work — who doesn’t love puppies? — has their adoption ceremonies on Friday afternoons and Saturday afternoons,” Godfrey said. “On Friday at about [3 p.m.] they bring in the dogs. It is loud and disruptive enough that we have ceased scheduling training on any Friday afternoon. 

“Just a week ago Friday, we had to cease recording [media] because when the dogs came in, the audible barking was quite loud and was being picked up by the microphones during the recording,” he said.

While Tamara Marshall, president of Save A Life, gave a presentation that said all potential issues, including noise, had been resolved with the mall, including an email that showed mall management confirmed there were no complaints regarding noise or odor “in the last 10 months from the space,” Godfrey said he had previously raised concerns to mall officials.

“There have been complaints,” Godfrey said at the meeting. “We made them to mall management. I had a face-to-face with [a] personal and business representative of Mehmet Ilbak, the owner of the mall. We expressed our concerns and he assured me they would address the noise abatement prior to kennel operations being considered.

”Some time after that meeting, a representative from mall management told me that the city had denied the zoning change request and that the matter of the kennels was dead,” Godfrey said. 

“For the mall to claim that there were no complaints, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they forgot,” Godfrey said.

Oviedo Community News left a message for the mall’s director of marketing and events, Josh Gunderson, but has not received a response by the time of publication.

Rather than asking the Council to deny the kennel request, Godfrey requested that they table the vote to give him, the mall and Save a Life an opportunity to “agree on some specific, adequate and enforceable sound abatement measures.”

With the disagreements seemingly looking like tenant-landlord issues, multiple Council members debated putting the approval on hold until the dispute could be resolved.

The five Council members debated whether it was the role of the city’s government to get in between a landlord and multiple tenants in a possible dispute, and made an initial change to the process to vote on a delay. 

However, when the time to vote on delaying any approval came, Councilmember Keith Britton decided, rather than delay a vote, to approve the kennel itself.

He made his final decision after questioning whether to delay it or not due to the fact that the current noise complaints are during working hours when the events are already permitted and not overnight when the kennel would actually be used, and during C3 Pathway’s regular 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. working hours.

”The problem’s still going to exist, I just don’t think we need to be in the middle of it anymore,” he said. 

The resolution passed unanimously. 

“What’s done is done,” Godfrey said following the vote. “Everybody will move forward and do the best to make things work moving forward.”

Following the hearing, Marshall said she wants to work with the mall and Godfrey to address any outstanding issues or concerns; she said the usage of the kennel is not imminent.

“I am planning on coordinating a meeting with the mall just to let them know what happened last night,” Marshall said. “Maybe there’s some adjustments we can make.

“I need to look at how I can invest in our space, do a little fundraising so we can do that investment, so we can make that investment [and] try and mitigate the noise more so for our neighbors,” she said. “I want to be proactive and I want to hear everyone’s thoughts and concerns and try to do my best moving forward.”

She said she and her team need to raise funds and make changes to the space before planning on having dogs spend a night, and there is no timeline for it to be used as an overnight kennel at the moment.

Currently, Save A Life relies on foster homes for its pets when the organization is not having events. Marshall said Save a Life could have as few as one or two, or upwards of 10 dogs in the kennel on any given event night, depending on how many are adopted. 

Save A Life takes in dogs from high-kill shelters across the Southeast US — primarily Northern Florida, Georgia and Alabama — and provides medical care and the transportation of the animals to Oviedo before putting them up for adoption.

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