Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-Say hello to Judi, a perfect dog I rescued from the deadly Los Angeles Animal Service’s East Valley shelter several years back. Her story is a perfect example of just one of the ways that LAAS loses millions of dollars each year while city officials look the other way.
This is a perfect week to tell Judi’s story because City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee addresses departmental budgets for the coming fiscal year, including that of LAAS, starting on Monday.
In the City of Los Angeles, the vast majority of dogs are unlicensed. If your dog happens to have one, and you ignore the “official” license renewal postcard from LAAS, your and Rover’s names will be purged from the system and you will never get another notice asking for that money. That’s never as in ever.
Take a look at that postcard.
It has no dog’s name, license number, amount owed, due date or whether proof of inoculations or spay/neuter is needed. It is no wonder that despite ongoing pet population problems and no spay/neuter law, LAAS sells roughly the same 100,000 dog licenses annually for a city that – a decade ago – was estimated by Mayor Villaraigosa’s office to have more than 1 million dogs! People simply ignore the cards and the city stops asking to be paid.
LAAS loses that money not only for that year, but for each subsequent year of each dog’s life. And that’s not counting the hundreds of thousands of dogs who were never licensed in the first place.
Do you know whose names fell out of the system when they ignored LAAS’s dog license renewal postcard? None other than City Council president Herb Wesson and his Pro Tem Mitch Englander, both of whom were delinquent for years, and who only paid what they owed after I made a Public Records Act request for those records, though LAAS now refuses to turn over other such records. Wesson paid a late fee for each year his licenses were past due, but Englander did not; more lost revenue.
Not that LAAS does, or ever has, used money wisely, efficiently and honestly, but LAAS’s financial failures result in poor care for the city’s homeless animals; lack of fully funded spay/neuter programs; un-air conditioned transport vehicles for the animals in sweltering weather; and as my CW colleague Phyllis Daugherty regularly points out, severe understaffing at LAAS (both in the shelters and an embarrassingly low number of Animal Control Officers out in the field) has resulted in life-threatening injuries so much so that a loss of life seems inevitable.
This was one of the issues I documented with precision at Wesson’s request after our lengthy meeting in his office on January 3, 2014 during which he said he would call for an audit – guaranteeing that it would be seconded by City Councilmember Paul Koretz (“to give Koretz cover”). But Galperin’s audit sidestepped each of the LAAS issues identified for him, presumably to keep them from embarrassing Mayor Garcetti. For two years, Galperin dodged doing an interview on his audit and now that it is two years later, after agreeing to do an interview, he has stated through his spokesperson, that the audit is now ancient history.
Each year that LAAS did not send a license renewal for Judi, I contacted LAAS GM Brenda Barnette. Nothing was resolved, and most years, no reply.
In 2014, I again contacted Barnette, Councilmember Paul Koretz (whose committee oversees LAAS), Barnette’s Assistant GM John Chavez, Garcetti’s LAAS Commissioners and their administrative aide, and Patty Whelan, who at that time, was Garcetti’s liaison to LAAS, though her primary “qualification” for the job (which she treated as a virtual no-show when it came to meetings) was that her mother was the top personnel executive for the city.
I got no reply, let alone a solution.
They didn’t contact me for Judi’s 2014 license fee, or her 2015 or 2016 fees, either.
So I ran an experiment. In 2016, I went online to buy a $55 dollar three-year license for Judi and other dogs adopted in one form or other through the non-profit rescue that I founded. I paid a total of $220. LAAS took the money, but never asked for the dogs’ spay/neuter certificates or proofs of vaccination.
LAAS never followed-up even though month after month has passed.
To prompt them, I poked at the hornet’s nest and challenged the charge through my credit card company which, correctly, denied my challenge. I only did it to see if LAAS would get its act together. It didn’t. To this day, LAAS, which never contacted me about this issue, has no idea how much money it failed to collect in dog license fees; whether the amount paid is correct (since a license fee for a spayed or neutered dog is significantly less expensive than for an intact dog) or whether Judi and the other dogs are properly altered or vaccinated.
One would think that if they check up on anyone, it would be an LAAS watchdog of more years than I care to count….
So when Councilmember Paul Krekorian and his City Council colleagues start talking cash with LAAS, he should raise Judi’s name, this article, and demand some answers, because failure to collect revenue is only one of the ways this department, under Mayor Garcetti, has failed Los Angeles.
And there are plenty of other examples to share.
As for Garcetti, his failure is the direct result of his and predecessor Antonio Villaraigosa’s firing of capable volunteer Commissioners whose lives are dedicated to humane issues -- replacing them with people who have little, if any, background for it. Case in point: the new LAAS Commission President is Larry Gross….a renown and leading advocate….not for humane issues, but rather, tenants’ rights.
All this has happened because, with Garcetti, the appearance of being successful is more important than admitting fault, starting fresh and making things work better.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. Verifiable tips and story ideas can be sent to him at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
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LA Knowingly Loses Millions of Dollars Each Year … Here’s How
