I applaud county Supervisors Janet Nguyen and Vicente Sarmiento who, on March 11, achieved important improvements in the county animal shelter. I’m happy that my district Supervisor, Don Wagner, spoke immediately after Nguyen and Sarmiento, and was in favor of improvements.
But more remains to be done.
Two years ago, we saw that the shelter was flunking its own Strategic Plan. The county bureaucracy and Supervisor Katrina Foley stalled and delayed. Meanwhile, to underline their wish to lower the shelter’s standards, they promoted Monica Schmidt, the manager who tore up the Strategic Plan.
Schmidt is a Political Scientist. Her shelter stints were mostly in public relations and Schmidt was never mentioned as a key employee before landing in OC.
Did Foley promote Schmidt looking for PR and photo-ops, counting on Schmidt’s Public Relations background and Political Science education? No wonder shelter operations have been falling apart under their watch.
We need the Strategic Plan more than ever. The community’s request is as reasonable as they come: Please implement the Strategic Plan we already paid for.
Unable to hide her failure in the OC Register, Foley resorted to sly misrepresentation: “The same people who are complaining we’re not implementing that plan have said we need to update and implement the plan.” What “update”? Every opinion piece asked for the Strategic Plan to be applied, not “updated” (i.e. revised). Foley is twisting the citizens’ words to serve her favorite bureaucrats.
And how did Foley go about this “update”? By delaying it as long as she could. First, the bureaucrats took a whole year to even issue a Request for Proposals (RFP).
This biased RFP got only one bid. In the OC Register, Foley said: “That RFP went out far and wide on the government bid website — and only one company bid.” She added: “everything is above board, fair and transparent.” Can Foley really be that naive after the Andrew Do scandal unfolded right under her nose? Andrew Do’s corrupt contracts met all the superficial formalities. But they were not OK. They were an abuse of power, enabled by bureaucrats including Dylan Wright and Cymantha Atkinson, who oversee the animal shelter. Did Foley learn the wrong lesson from the Andrew Do affair? Did she just learn how to use Andrew Do’s tricks more deftly?
A consultant who didn’t bid told the OC Register’s Teri Sforza: “It seems like they need a lot more than strategic planning there.” And: “This sounds like a business that needs an overhaul. A root-cause analysis.” Now we know. The county pushed away the bidders that hold to high standards.
Then more delays. Dylan Wright’s operation took several months to “rank” one bid. (Huh?) Now, it’s taking six more months to “negotiate.”
Oh, but the county moves slowly, they’ll tell you. Don’t believe it. The county moves slowly when it doesn’t want to move at all. In 2023, when an utterly wasteful contract was brought up, and we raised the alarm, Dylan Wright moved at lightning speed, rewriting the contract in just two weeks. Foley pushed the suspicious sole-source contract through. No scruples or delays on that one. Two weeks to hand a contract to a former county employee that failed to deliver. Two years to get anything done about the Strategic Plan.
We get it. Wright, Schmidt, and Foley don’t like the Strategic Plan because it sets standards. Instead of working to meet these standards, they want to lower them.
“It’s a baseline” said Foley on social media. If it’s a baseline, why isn’t the county following it already? The county is blatantly failing national standards. It doesn’t have enough Animal Care Attendants (ACAs) to clean the kennels and feed the animals. At a Board meeting, Schmidt pulled one of her Public Relations and Political Science tricks: She put Animal Care Attendants, office staff, and volunteers all in one bucket, to come up with wildly inflated numbers. Foley was only too happy to back her protégée. Community members showed Schmidt’s calculation is a sham. Some shelter volunteers wrote a scathing letter of rebuttal.
By the national standards on feeding the animals and cleaning the kennels, an attendant needs 15 minutes per animal – all before the public comes in. I’ll be generous and say they have four hours (7am-11am) to do it. That means one attendant for every 16 animals.
On March 19 the shelter had 280 animals. Divide by 16. You get 17 or 18 attendants doing nothing but cleaning and feeding for four solid hours every single day. This number is not referring to the employment roster. It’s the number of ACAs needed on site each day to feed the animals and clean the kennels.
Only ACAs do this job. Not volunteers. Not other staff.
You still need ACAs doing intakes and other tasks. JVR, the firm the county hired to write the Strategic Plan, calculated the total need as 26 ACAs every day. No wonder Dylan Wright (no stranger to scheming, as we saw in the Andrew Do scandal) maneuvered to keep JVR out of the Strategic Plan RFP this time.
Supervisor Foley, is your blind faith in Wright and Schmidt enough to overrule basic arithmetic?
I want to end on a positive note. Supervisors Janet Nguyen and Vicente Sarmiento did our county proud. We ask the rest of the Board to stop the bleeding. There is a simple action that can end this mess. Affirm the 2018 Strategic Plan and instruct Wright and Schmidt to implement it. Start by reallocating resources to Animal Care Attendants.
Karen Vaughn is a long-time resident of Anaheim Hills, a former volunteer at the county animal shelter, and an advocate for sound local government.
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