City Council Preview - Dec 6

City staff wants to expand our contract with Orange County Animal Services (OCAS), the infamous county animal “care” agency that has been investigated by their own agency and by the Grand Jury several times in the recent past (Click Here and Here). Before we consider their suggestions, let’s look at how well OCAS functions.

LACK OF MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP

The Grand Jury criticized OCAS for their lack of management and leadership. The management and the leadership have remained unchanged.

COVER-UP

OCAS was found to be under-estimating the kill rate and over-estimating the license compliance rate. Their initial reaction was to deny both claims, and eventually admit their errors, although they claimed they were not intentional. Imagine a multi-million dollar agency that can’t accurately compute their own major outcome variables?

LAW BREAKERS

OCAS was sued for violating the law with regard to their euthanasia practices. They entered into an agreement with the plaintiff, and within a few months, the plaintiff was once again pursuing them for violating the law. No court judgment has come down against them yet but that is probably only a matter of time.

INABILITY TO RESPOND

From the time their errors in death rate calculations were disclosed until they finally corrected the data, it was more than 6 months. Their errors in calculating license compliance issues have been known for more than a year, but never corrected to this date.

SECRET MEETINGS

The powerful Finance/Operations Advisory Board (FOAB) that virtually sets policies meets outside the Brown Act and refuses to allow anyone from the public or related agencies to attend. They do not even have minutes that can be examined.

DESERTED

OCAS is so well known for their poor care and poor service that their contract cities have been deserting them in large numbers. Only a few years ago they had nearly two dozen cities under contract. As of January 1 2017 that number is down to 14. Here in South Orange County, from Irvine to the San Diego border, only 2 cities remain under contract with them – unfortunately Lake Forest is one of those cities.

POOR RECORD KEEPING

Last year I discovered that OCAS had been billing me twice per year for one of my dog licenses. I’m not sure how long this had been going on, but once I discovered the problem it took me a while to get it straightened out. I blamed myself for failing to pay attention. I assumed that when they asked for the annual license fee they had done their homework and it was appropriate.

If this was the only incident, it could be ignored. But two weeks ago I was playing with my other dog and he bit me by accident. The bite was serious enough that I went to the hospital and got it treated, and a few days later I got a phone message from OCAS saying they wanted to conduct a rabies investigation. I returned the call, only to get a recorded message saying that they were closed for the holidays. I tried for 3 days even after the holiday was over and got the same message.

During this time I found a notice from them in my garden. I assume they placed it on the gate and it blew into the garden, but who knows.

On Sunday morning about 8 am I went for a walk with my dogs and found an animal control officer waiting for me. She wanted to know why I hadn’t responded to their notices. I told her I called 3 times but they were never there. She asked why I didn’t leave a message. I said because their message says you should only leave a message if the problem is “urgent”. Since there was nothing “urgent”, I left no message. She was unaware that only “urgent” messages could be left.

She explained that they were concerned that I had been bitten by an unregistered dog who didn’t have a rabies vaccination, and therefore it was possible a rabid dog was loose. I could be wrong, but I think a rabid dog is extremely rare in Orange County. We do get rapid bats, but rabid dogs are thankfully a thing of the past. Anyhow, I wondered why she was asking me about a dog that was registered with OCAS and about whom they had the full rabies vaccination information. She said she found nothing. I dug out my license certification which had the rabies vaccination, and she took down the data. She then charged me $95 to pay for her time coming out to investigate, which seemed curious given that the need for her to come out was precipitated by the fact that OCAS lost my dog’s information. But I paid anyway.

My personal stories here are probably more than you want to know, but the point is that OCAS does a poor job no matter what they do. They screw up their statistics, the lose data on their animals, they double bill for animals, etc.

Is this the kind of agency we want to give more money to?

Tomorrow let’s look at what the staff proposes.

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 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a Town Hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be in January at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.