Save the Pets, Save the City

There areseveral big issues in this campaign. One of them is the corruption caused by the Gang of 3 accepting money from developers special interests and then voting 100% of the time to let their campaign contributors do anything they want to do, even when staff, residents, and Commissions recommend against it. The result of the never-ending building of new homes is more traffic and more crowding in schools. Martin Henderson recently covered this issue (Click Here).

Another main issue is the animal shelter. The Gang of 3 do not want Lake Forest residents to have our own no kill animal shelter. Instead the Gang wants to continue using the County’s high kill and disgraced shelter (Click Here). The County wants Lake Forest to stay because other cities have been moving out of the County shelter in droves. They lost 8 cities in recent years. Now in South OC there are only 2 cities that use the County – us and San Juan Capistrano (Click Here). No one else wanted to continue to suffer under the County’s care, and even San Juan Capistrano tried their best to team up with a no-kill shelter elsewhere.

As a reward for voting to stay with the County, Supervisors Bartlett and Spitzer endorsed the Gang of 3 for re-election.

There is a new flyer that just came out (see above). It states that Leah Basile and Adam Nick will vote for a no-kill animal shelter in Lake Forest if they are elected. You know how I am going to vote on this issue. That means that if Basile and Nick are elected, we will have a no kill shelter in Lake Forest.

WHAT ABOUT THE COUNTY DEAL?

The Gang of 3 forced the City to sign an agreement with the County. If Leah Basile and Adam Nick are elected we will scrutinize the agreement carefully and look for any opportunity to cancel the agreement. We will hold the County to achieve every single milestone to which they agreed, and if they don’t, which they probably will not, we will use this as an opportunity to terminate the contract.

COUNTY PLUS?

If some miracle occurs and the County does what its says it will do within the time limits and costs they specified, we may be stuck with the contract. But the contract does not require us to use them. It only requires us to pay them if we use them. In other words we can establish an alternate system and use that system instead of the County's horrible system.

• · We already have a local Veterinarian who is willing to transform his veterinary practice into a local no kill shelter.
• · We have several local nonprofit groups who are willing to do the outreach necessary to prevent animals going into the shelter, or place them rapidly or get them adopted.
• · We have a local nonprofit group that is willing to provide the animal control services.

Thus, all the elements are in place for us to have our own no-kill option.

With our own no kill option in place, the County can be used in emergency cases and for back-up if needed. In fact, having the County as a backup means that the operating costs of our own no kill shelter will be much less. Providing after-hours animal control is very expensive, in terms of equipment and employees. If we are forced to go ahead with the County contract, using them for after-hours services will be financially beneficial, and ASAP we can pull the animals so they don’t suffer under the County’s well-known horrible care.

YOUR VOTE

This can only happen if you vote for Leah Basile and Adam Nick.

Unless these two people get elected, we will be stuck with paying nearly $1,000,000 for the County to build a shelter miles away, our pets will be badly treated, and many will be killed. Instead we could have a local no kill animal shelter with better care and service at a lower cost, but this can only happen if you vote for Leah Basile and Adam Nick.

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 November at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.