New Problems Emerge at Orange County Animal Care

New problems with the way the Coiunty collecvts data have been discovered.

OCSD

I recently reported on the County’s penchant to disseminate incorrect information that put the County’s services in a favorable light. This first arose a few months ago in a discussion of Police services where the OC Sheriff’s Department representative in an attempt to dissuade the Lake Forest City Council from getting a bid from nearby Irvine, quoted the costs per capita for Irvine at $325 and the costs to Lake Forest through OCSD at a mere $170. (Click here for the full story).

The truth turns out to be somewhat different. OCSD charges Lake Forest more and Irvine pays less. Instead of the $170 quoted by OCSD the real figure turns out to be $189. OCSD is more expensive than they claimed. Instead of the $325 for Irvine, the real figure turns out to be $298. Irvine is less expensive than they claimed. By OCSD estimates Irvine was costing 91% more while in reality it was only 58% more. That’s quite a difference!

EUTHANASIA RATE

Flash forward a few months and I was sitting at a Board of Supervisors meeting when I heard the new head of Orange County Animal Care (OCAC) claim that the euthanasia rate for dogs at the County’s only shelter was less than 6%. Instinctively I knew that wasn’t correct, and after much research and communication with OCAC I learned that they were using a unique system that no other shelter uses – they counted DEAD animals who show up at the shelter as live intakes. By inflating their admissions numbers, this in turn, decreases the euthanasia rate. For example, 10/100 = 10% but 10/1000 = 1%. The difference was substantial when I looked at 2014 numbers. In that year, OCAC claimed that only 9.6% of the dogs were euthanized, but the true figure was 23%. Once again, that’s a heck of a difference. (Click Here for the full story)

LICENSING COMPLIANCE

This week at a meeting of the Lake Forest City Council I was introduced to another example of the County’s dissemination of false information by a local resident, Randy Johnson. In this case it’s how they calculate the dog license compliance data, and once again, they are reporting information that makes them look good but it isn’t correct. The true information makes them look less adequate.

The problem in this case, in addition to some math errors, is that they are using old population figures to compute compliance, and by using the old figures they are reducing the size of the denominator and thus increasing the size of the rate. This is the opposite of what they do with euthanasia rate, which is simple to explain if you want to fudge your data. Euthanasia rates should be lowered, so it pays to increase your denominator, but compliance rates should be higher, so it pays to decrease your denominator.

For compliance, they use a population figure for Lake Forest in 2014 as 77,264, which is the 2010 census figure. But the true figure for 2014 is 80,070 according to the City’s Department of Finance. Once you substitute the higher number into the equation, the compliance rate drops from 51.8% to 43.5%, a much less impressive number.

WHAT’’S HAPPENING?

The trend is disturbing, when public agencies provide data that is distorted in a direction that shows their performance in a better light than it actually is. Especially under circumstances where a contract city is trying to decide whether or not the contract they have with the County is the best deal they can achieve. What’s even more disturbing is that I notified Supervisors Bartlett and Spitzer months ago about the false euthanasia rate data and neither one has had the courtesy of replying, nor to my knowledge, has anything been done to correct the situation.

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 on Dec 12 at 2 pm at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.

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