Animal Care in Lake Forest - Part 5 (Paying More but Getting Less)

We’ve been examining animal care in light of the scathing report by the Orange County Grand Jury about conditions at the County animal shelter. Part 2 looked at Lake Forest. Part 3 examined the County shelter’s Physical Condition and the Ability to Serve. Park 4 looked at the recommendations from the Grand Jury and some of the options available to Lake Forest. Today we want to explore one of those options in more detail.

Lake Forest has some 500 live animals who went into the County shelter last year at a cost of over $600,000, about two thirds of which came from fees and licenses ($417,938) and the rest came from our general fund ($189,247). Of the 500 who went in, 35% were euthanized, 21% were adopted, 17% were returned to their owners, and 14% were taken by rescue groups.

In our neighbor city, Mission Viejo, they took in 1,226 animals and only 7% were euthanized (FWIW – MV also services LN and AV). The cost to Mission Viejo taxpayers was about $500,000, remarkably less than the amount that Lake Forest taxpayers shelled out to the County. Of the $500,000 paid by Mission Viejo, more than $100,000 went toward depreciation; so on an operating basis, the cost was closer to $400,000. Compare that to the $600,000 Lake Forest paid.

How can Mission Viejo provide better service, at a lower cost, to more animals?

How can our City be spending more money than the citizens from our neighboring cities and a third of our animals are killed within days of being admitted, while healthy animals admitted to the Mission Viejo shelter are never euthanized?

We can posit several possibility reasons –

MORE VOLUNTEERS

The Mission Viejo shelter provides a high level of care where the quality of life for the animals is foremost in everyone’s mind. As a result, it’s a great place to volunteer, and volunteers help make the place a more efficient and effective facility. It also helps reduce the costs of providing care. Volunteers provide hundreds of thousands of dollars of FREE care. Contrast that with the County shelter, where the physical conditions are slightly better than appalling and where the prospects of killing hundreds of animals every week makes volunteering an unpleasant task.

MORE LOCAL

Mission Viejo also has a much higher rate of recovered animals, probably because it’s a local shelter and getting there is a matter of a few minutes, not an hour through the busiest intersections in the County.

BETTER FUND RAISING

Another possible reason for the superior performance of the Mission Viejo shelter is their fund raising group who typically raise more than $100,000 per year to provide extra services. MV has an active fund raising group because the quality of care is high, and people take pride in the service they are providing. Contrast that to the County where the poor quality of care is routinely exposed in the Los Angeles Times or the OC Register and elsewhere. It’s hard to try raising money for a service that is so poorly regarded.

In the near future, the County is going to try to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from Lake Forest taxpayers so that the County can build a new place where our animals can be poorly treated and euthanized. Building a new shelter is certainly a good step, but it will hardly address the issues of poor service and the high kill rate. These will remain unless the County adopts a policy of building several smaller local shelters to serve the local communities. But every member of the Board of Supervisors has rejected this option, and the County staff is also unanimous in their preference for the “one size fits all” monolith that currently exists.

Lake Forest should actively pursue working with Mission Viejo or Irvine to partner with them in using their shelter. Alternately, if they cannot accommodate us, we should work with our neighbors (Laguna Hills, RSM, Laguna Woods) to establish a local multi-city shelter. It’s the prudent thing to do from a financial perspective, will give our citizens better service, and it’s also the humane thing to do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 3 pm to 5 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a mini town meeting quarter. The next meeting will be on August 15 at 2 pm at the El Toro Public Library.

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