TALK BACK - Joseph Mailander's "The Fur is Flying at LA's Animal Services” (CityWatch) was quite an interesting read. Sadly, it's not an article based on facts, and it's sufficiently non-factual in some ways as to be harmful to both the cause of animal welfare and the search for truth.
I do not doubt that Mr. Mailander quoted people accurately or that they told him they were very prominent in the animal community. However, I know they did not give him accurate information and he did not talk to those who could have.
In the future Mr. Mailander needs much more reliable sources than Daniel Guss and Paul Darrigo if he's going to write about animal issues.
First, let me set people straight on what Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS) has jurisdiction over. It's not "hundreds of millions of critters." It might not be a stretch to say that, when you add up the dogs, cats, rabbits, horses, various other domesticated animals and wildlife we deal with, we have some responsibility for about two million.
We have some contact with about 200,000 a year. The rest of the nesters, stalkers, gallopers, spawners and burrowers are most likely under someone else's jurisdiction, be it State Fish and Game, US Fish and Wildlife or the US Department of Agriculture.
The notion that billionaire Gary Michelson (founder of the Found Animals Foundation, which works cooperatively with LAAS on adoption, spay/neuter and animal identification projects of the sort we want to do anyway) sets Mayor Villaraigosa's animal agenda is silly.
I checked and learned that the Mayor has been in the same room with Michelson once in the last three years and spoken to him on the phone only once in the same time period (about a non-animal issue). If there are any other animal-loving billionaires hanging out in LA, I wish they would call me because my department would welcome their interest.
As for the influence of animal-loving TV reporter Lu Parker, I have to say I welcome it. It's clear that the Mayor's awareness of and engagement with animal issues has increased since he's known her. How that's a bad thing for animals in this city is something I can't fathom.
So, having rendered irrelevant the proposition that "billionaires who own the Mayor" dictate animal policy in City Hall, we can look at the supposition that the Mayor and/or I want to privatize LAAS.
First and foremost, it supposes that I want to work myself out of a job. I didn't relocate from Seattle at great effort and expense to divest the City of LA of the department it hired me to run.
It did, however, hire me to run a department which is, like just about every City department these days, underfunded to handle the tasks people want it to handle. That necessitates creativity, either in trying to identify other resources to provide the services, to run expensive, overflowing facilities with inadequate staffing, or to successfully mothball those facilities without allowing them to be plundered by vandals for their copper wire and fixtures.
Even before I arrived, the City had decided to look at finding ways to keep as many of the animal shelters open as possible, preferably without laying off any City staff needed to operate them.
Other public and private animal agencies were consulted and trial balloons floated. Best Friends Animal Society - apparently the main bogey man in the minds of the conspiracy theorists - ended up being the only one that stepped forward with a shelter operations proposal that could fly both financially and philosophically. Critics demanded a "more open" process for any subsequent shelter-related RFPs and that generated one proposal from one entity and an informal expression of interest from another.
Nothing else came in from Best Friends, which has plenty enough to do to fulfill its contract at the Northeast Valley shelter in Mission Hills and which will cost the group at least $1 million a year. So much for the conspiracy theory.
It appears I will have the resources to staff six City shelters beginning July 1. One of them will be a beautiful - and large - facility in South Los Angeles, which the Mayor likes to call "ground zero" in terms of need, from kennel space to animal-related law enforcement. (He should know, since he's spent dozens of hours volunteering in the current South LA shelter.)
We'll have to largely shutter the existing South LA facility near Crenshaw and Jefferson, but I hope something new can happen there sooner rather than later. The rest of our facilities will still be City animal shelters.
Whether privatizing the system is a good idea will be left for the politicians sworn in on July 1, 2013, to figure out, based on what kind of budgets they have to grapple with going forward. I would imagine that, if the economy ever recovers, this debate will die down.
Mr. Mailander’s article provided a forum for the aforementioned Messrs. Guss and Darrigo to question my veracity and communications skills. As I told a roomful of New Hope Partners on Thursday night (May 3rd), no one ever called me a liar in my professional life until I came to LA to work. And, once you get past their deft (or at least insistent) spinning techniques, it's pretty easy to see where their allegations fail to match reality.
Then again, despite a comparable abundance of passionate animal activists in every community I've worked in, LA takes the cake for generating activists with under-developed resumés who, along with their camp followers, nonetheless think they know how to run a $19 million-a-year City department better than I or any of my predecessors. But I can see how someone could be taken in by their passion.
Regarding the Reserve Animal Control Officer (RACO) program, Mr. Darrigo doesn't lead a group that provides the education. He has, however, generously spent time on his own raising money to fund the next RACO training class, which we expect to launch later this year.
I've done nothing to diminish the "presence of RACOs within the city," I've just asked the City Attorney to make sure that, when department staffers take the training to be RACOs that it doesn't create any conflicts with union contracts that stipulate that we have to promote them and pay them accordingly if they work in positions they weren't hired for.
Having to pay them would kind of undercut the point of RACOs being volunteers. Since citizen volunteers (who aren't subject to the union contracts) have been outnumbered by department staff by something like a 6-to-1 ratio in terms of RACO enrollment, it's not a phony issue, as Darrigo would have the community believe.
That being said, we appreciate Mr.Darrigo's work and we're looking forward to going ahead with the next training.
Descriptions of my statements on spay/neuter come directly from the persistent manipulations of Mr. Guss. He loves to harp on points based on his editing and re-positioning of things I may or may not have said in the past, but I explained it to the New Hopers pretty succinctly on May 3rd: I've never worked in a community before where I thought mandatory spay/neuter laws were preferable, but I told everyone who interviewed me for this job, from activists to Councilmembers to the Mayor, that, if I got the job, I would uphold LA's ordinance.
And, right this moment, I'm working with the Mayor, Councilmembers and activists to strengthen it primarily based on the recommendations of a spay/neuter advisory committee that was populated mostly with strong spay/neuter advocates, a couple of whom are among my most vociferous critics. If I wanted to undermine the City's spay/neuter law (or ignore the input of critics), why would I do that?
The truth is that I do believe in listening to all sides of an issue as long as they’re coming from people who are trying to be constructive participants irrespective of any orthodoxy being pushed by a given faction in the activist community.
So if breeders (or others) want to tell me what they think about something LAAS is or is not doing, they should feel free to do so. But that doesn't mean I'm obligated to agree with them. Developing policy is both an iterative and collaborative process and useful suggestions can come from a variety of sources.
Finally, the aforementioned May 3rd meeting with New Hope Partners was held to let them provide me with feedback on a proposal to restructure certain staffing aspects of the New Hope Program that provides rescue groups with enhanced access to shelter animals.
I had to spend most of the first hour or so of the meeting standing up to overt hostility and addressing misinformation that appeared to have been spread specifically to rile people up before being able to walk the audience through how the restructuring should work. And I made it clear that if aspects of the changes were not working as anticipated, I wanted to hear from them about it ASAP.
The adjustments were made primarily to deal with the department's shelter staffing shortages. We have to make better use of all our available Animal Control Technicians, while providing New Hopers with the same, or possibly better, service.
It'll either work or it won't, but under the circumstances, I have no alternative. The animals in our shelters deserve to be adequately taken care of and we need more help in the kennels.
If I'm guilty of favoring any organizations, it's those that show clearly that they're willing to work with us within the very real legal and fiscal constraints that the department faces, maybe even help us overcome those fiscal constraints (such as Best Friends and Found Animals), and place the welfare of all the animals first and foremost.
The City of LA is, I believe, making a remarkable effort to be a leader in municipal animal welfare in a variety of ways and under very difficult circumstances. It's an effort that began before I arrived and which I hope will continue after I depart.
But I don't expect to be leaving anytime soon. I made a promise to the Mayor, the Council, the activists and, most importantly, to the animals that I'd do everything I could to make things better, preferably as part of a team with the humane community.
And I'm not done yet. I hope the community isn’t either.
(Brenda Barnette is general manager, Los Angeles Animal Services. She can be reached at: [email protected] and www.twitter.com/lacitypets) -cw
Tags: Brenda Barnette, Animal Services, Los Angeles, LA Animal Services, Mayor Villaraigosa, Best Friends, Found Animals, Daniel Guss, Paul Darrigo, dogs, cats, Animal Shelters
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 37
Pub: May 8, 2012