City Council Preview for Dec 6 - Part 3

We’ve been examining the staff report for this week’s Council meeting in which staff proposes we engage OCAS (Orange County Animal Services) to do additional canvassing for the City at a cost of nearly $30,000, additional Public Education for $40,000 per year, and some off hand suggestions that adjusting fees, holding low cost events, and declaring an amnesty might be good things to think about.

Sunday we looked at how well OCAS performs. We noted

• Poor management and leadership (Grand Jury conclusion)
• Poor quality care and service (Grand Jury conclusion)
• Secret meetings (FOAB or Finance/Operations Advisory Board)
• Violation of laws (Sharon Logan lawsuit)
• Under-report data on killing animals
• Over-estimating how well they get people to license their dogs
• Double billing for licenses
• Missing data on animal licenses and vaccinations

Monday we looked at staff recommendations. We noted

· Staff recommends spending $40,000 per year to have someone wander the City parks talking to dog owners with no estimate of the ROI, no job description, and no indication of the impact of the job on current field services.

· Staff recommends spending nearly $30,000 over 3 years to increase canvassing without ever looking at OCAS’s own data that indicates canvassing doesn’t even pay for itself, nor the problems OCAS has reporting canvassing data, nor the problems they have keeping track of licenses, etc. Staff provides no estimate of the cost benefits of the $30,000 investment.

· Staff recommends considering amnesty programs without giving us the results of the last amnesty program, nor the ROI for an amnesty program.

· Staff recommends looking at fee structures, but gives no data to guide us, nor raises the idea of licensing cats, something that was recommended in the 2015 Performance Audit report.

· Staff recommends considering low cost events with no estimate of the ROI for doing so and no KPIs as to what the City might expect as a benefit.

Today we’ll look at their suggestions about an “adoption center pilot program”.

SERVICES FOR WHOM?

The idea of this program seems to be to provide pet adoption services in Lake Forest, but these services are not intended for pets from Lake Forest but rather for pets from OCAS with serves 14 cities. In fact, according to the contract, only 60% of the pets need come from OCAS.

Not only are the pets to come from anywhere, the people adopting the pets can equally come from anywhere. There is no provision to limit or even concentrate sales to Lake Forest residents.

No one is more happy than I am to support the idea of pet adoption, but why are Lake Forest taxpayers funding a universal pet adoption program. Animals from shelters can be adopted from neighboring Mission Viejo, Irvine, and Laguna Beach as well as dozens of rescue groups that operate in our City. This program recommended by staff adds nothing to those programs but will be funded by Lake Forest taxpayers.

KPIs

When we look at contracts I like to look at what the KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are. What are we asking this adoption center to accomplish?

• · Operate a website
• · Write two articles per year for the City’s Leaflet
• · Provide literature about pet ownership
• · Publicize low and no-cost services
• · Counsel adoptees

This isn’t much of a request, nor are these KPIs very impressive. I realize that $15,000 is not a lot of money in a $40,000,000 annual budget, but surely we would want to achieve more than this from the use of taxpayer money.

WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING!

Let’s back up for a moment and consider what the problem is and what we should be doing about it.

The problem is that hundreds of cats, dogs, and other animals find their way from Lake Forest into OCAS. They are treated badly, sometimes die in transit and other times are killed on site. The cost to the City is $600,000 per year. In 2015 the numbers were

• · 200 dogs (95 Stray, 38 ORE, 22 Lost, 19 Bite, 12 Surrender, 7 Cruelty, 7 Police, 3 Owner Dead)
• · 117 cats (69 Stray, 25 TNR, 21 ORE, 18 Surrender, 5 Bite, 4 Lost, 2 Cruelty,
• · 65 birds (62 injured, 3 surrender)
• · 89 “other” (72 injured, 8 Surrender, 7 Bite, 2 Cruelty)
• · 189 DOA or died on route

This is an average of 40 live animals per month, 9 per week or 1 to 2 per day.

Getting out is not so easy.

• · 164 were killed (54 dogs, 50 cats, 24 birds, 36 other)
• · 102 were adopted (59 dogs, 30 cats, 4 birds, 9 other)
• · 85 were returned to their owners (79 dogs, 4 cats, 2 other)
• · 54 were ordered to be killed by their owners (35 dogs, 19 cats)
• · 74 were transferred to another agency (7 dogs, 28 cats, 23 birds, 18 other)

We can take an even larger view of the problem when we consider the financial aspects. According to the staff report, only 14% of the $600,000 we spend is for “Shelter Services”. The rest is spent for “Field services” (48%) and for “special services” (38%). According to the staff report “field services” refer to “services that benefit the public at large (i.e. such as addressing animal wildlife issues)” while “special services” “represent administrative costs associated with licensing.”

But the staff report is less than revealing. “Field services” as defined by OCAS go far beyond “animal wildlife issues” and in fact, “animal wildlife” is a very small part of field services. According to OCAS the major fields services are stray animal calls (18,858), dead animal pick-ups (8,012), bite investigations (5,346), and “wild animal calls” (4,732). “Animal wildlife issues” are the least common field service for OCAS as a whole.

Regardless of whether we focus on the high kill rate or we focus on the high cost of field services, it’s obvious that the adoption center idea put forth in this proposal doesn’t address either of these concerns.

SUMMARY

For Tuesday night’s meeting staff is offering some recommendations to improve our current service from OCAS. None of the recommendations come with any expected ROI, and none provide research on the impact of similar programs in the past or currently. None have any real key performance indicators and none have systematically looked at the nature of the problems confronting us and offered a solution.

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.