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County managers failed our animal shelter

September 24, 2024

Millions of dollars wasted. Senior Orange County managers conducting shady deals. A failure of accountability at the department of Community Resources.

No, I’m not talking about the Supervisor Andrew Do scandal amply reported in the OC Register. I’m talking about Orange County Animal Care, the county shelter. Despite a 28 million dollar annual budget and a 35 million dollar facility, the shelter is failing industry and community standards.

In the Do scandal and the mismanagement of the shelter, the failure of the county’s top echelons and its Community Resources department has the same symptoms. No regard for the needs of the community. A propensity for backroom deals. And, when inconvenient facts come to light, a stubborn coverup.

The Orange County Grand Jury showed the shelter has only one third of the number of kennel attendants required by industry standards. The shelter director’s response? She had no calculation to show. Just artificially inflated numbers pulled out of a hat. The director even claimed a flagrantly incorrect number of volunteers. Volunteers have no confidence in the manager that just miscounted them.

The understaffing led to safety problems, including a life-threatening incident. Instead of making the shelter safer by hiring kennel attendants, the county resorted to under-reporting animal bites, to the public and to the Grand Jury. (Is that perjury?)

Understaffing also means dogs don’t get daily out-of-kennel time. Socialization of large dogs has all but disappeared. These activities, standard in good shelters, are crucial for reducing stress and facilitating adoptions. Without socialization, dogs become stressed and therefore harder to adopt out successfully. They can end up needlessly euthanized.

COVID restrictions, kept in place for almost 4 years, were only partially relaxed in 2024. Some restrictions persist, as the Register’s Teri Sforza reported. OC has the shortest visiting hours of any large regional shelter. It keeps some adoptable dogs out of sight. In a telling twist, shelter managers also bar visitors from poorly-maintained areas of the facility.

A sweetheart contract was awarded to a former employee (and, we suppose, friend of county managers) who collected payments but produced none of the deliverables named in the contract.

The list goes on and on. The county gave dozens of small pets (such as guinea pigs) to a reptile organization for shipment to Arizona. (In a similar San Diego case, small pets ended up processed into snake food.) As Tony Saavedra reported in the Register, the shelter kept giving dogs to an unqualified organization, Woofy Acres, despite warning signs. Dozens of Woofy Acres dogs ended up euthanized.

Last year, even the shelter’s basic animal counts were wrong. Other disturbing problems were flagged in these pages by state Sen. Janet Nguyen.

The Do scandal has been brewing for almost a year, because top managers kept denying the problem. It now appears that these top managers are the root cause of the problem. Their make-believe investigation looks like a stalling tactic.

In the same way, top managers buried inconvenient revelations about the animal shelter. They played for time, hoping that attention would fade. Meanwhile they resorted to false statements and entrenched the mismanagement.

The shelter now has the second unqualified director in a row. The current one (Monica Schmidt) is a political scientist whose experience is dominated by Public Relations. The previous director (Andi Bernard) had no shelter experience at all. These choices, made by the very same county managers that brought us the Supervisor Andrew Do scandal, are motivated by these bureaucrats’ desire to cover up bad performance and reward their collaborators at the expense of the taxpayer.

Frontline staff, hard-working and conscientious, are also victims of the county’s unaccountable top brass. In the Do scandal, frontline staff objected to the corrupt contracts, but Community Resources director Dylan Wright overruled them and sent the money to the now disgraced recipients. At the shelter, kennel attendants work long hours, but their dedication cannot make up for the misallocation of resources and misguided policies put in place by Monica Schmidt and Community Resources.

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The latest bureaucratic subterfuge is a “new” Strategic Plan for the shelter… yet one already exists. The 2018 Strategic Plan was the blueprint for a good shelter. County taxpayers paid over $400,000 to develop it, but county managers abandoned it. Is the purpose of a “new” plan to discard facts and replace them with the bureaucrats’ fairy tales?

You can’t do good planning based on false premises. You can’t have a community conversation if the county’s reaction to every problem is a coverup.

The county managers have lost their credibility. Who knows what else they’re sweeping under the rug. Where’s the accountability for the dead animals, wasted taxpayer dollars, and deteriorating service? The Board of Supervisors needs to pick up its oversight responsibility.

County managers should come clean and acknowledge the animal shelter’s troubles. You can’t fix a problem if you keep pretending it’s not there. If the bureaucrats continue to stall, the Board of Supervisors should invite non-profits to take over animal services.

We have a shining example nearby: The San Diego Humane Society provides a far better level of service to its contract cities, at a competitive cost.

Orange County residents deserve a decent animal shelter. If the county bureaucrats can’t deliver one, let’s outsource it.

Michael Mavrovouniotis retired from a career in scientific research, education, and investment management.

Orange County Register

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County managers failed our animal shelter

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