Workers Dog Pet Owners on Fees : Door-to-Door Canvass Puts Collar on Unlicensed Southland Canines

Beatrice Mireles eyed the yellow stucco house anxiously from across the street. Three occupants of that house in Pico Rivera had been living outside the law. Bandit, Kingee and Huggy Bear, a sheep dog and two Lhasa apsos, had not been registered with the city in more than two years.

Mireles’ job: to extract $67.50 in delinquent dog license fees from the owner of the pets.

She took a deep breath and knocked on the door, which was opened by a sleepy-looking woman in a red robe. Mireles launched into her usual spiel--about how she was hired by the city to check on dog registration, about how the three dogs had not been registered since 1987 and . . . about the money.

The woman in the robe was not surprised. “You want me to write you a check right now?” she asked Mireles. “I work seven days a week and I don’t have time to register my dogs. This is how I did it two years ago.”

Track Down Thousands

And with that, the three dogs joined the list of thousands tracked down by Mid-Valley Manpower, an El Monte-based group that contracts with Pico Rivera and several other cities, including Los Angeles, to hound dog owners about their delinquent license fees. Mid-Valley, a federally funded job agency, splits the license revenue with the cities, and last year the canvass for canines netted Pico Rivera about $13,000 of its $95,000 in dog license fees.

Cities are not concerned only about the money. Unlicensed dogs are also a health threat, because many of them have not received their annual rabies vaccination, explained Dan Morrison, executive director of the Southeast Area Animal Control Authority, a nine-city cooperative agency in southeastern Los Angeles County.

“When you’re next to a foreign border where you don’t have any control over rabies, infected animals can come across the border,” Morrison said. “The city has to have some way of ensuring the dogs are vaccinated. The only way you can be effective is to get to that door and get to that dog owner.”

Getting to each door is the task that has fallen to Mid-Valley Manpower for about the last five years. It is one of a handful of agencies whose workers canvass for dog license fees in the Los Angeles area.

Door-to-Door Search

The agency also conducts annual canvasses for the cities of Downey, Norwalk, Bell Gardens and Lynwood, as well as in South El Monte, Santa Ana and parts of Los Angeles. Canvassing the smaller cities takes about a month, while Mid-Valley workers are in their third year of trying to complete a door-to-door search of about half the city of Los Angeles, outside the center city.

Canvassing in Los Angeles is not much different than in the suburbs, Romero said. “We don’t have more of a problem with animals in the streets or anything,” he said. “Our workers don’t have any special problems in L.A.”

On any given day, one of Mid-Valley’s 30 workers will knock on more than 150 doors. Cities provide Mid-Valley with a list of dog owners who are delinquent on the fees, but the workers typically knock on every door to check for dogs that may be new to the area.

One cloudy morning, Mireles tackled Clarinda Avenue in Pico Rivera. There was no answer at most of the doors where she knocked, so Mireles left bright yellow flyers outlining the city’s dog licensing procedures.

Telltale Bark

She knocked at one door and was about to leave when she heard a telltale bark--there was a dog, and a dog owner watering in the back yard. Mireles, in her Mid-Valley uniform of white shirt, navy blue pants and tennis shoes, leaned on a gate as she explained the licensing fee.

“Most people are pretty nice about it,” she said, as she made a note of the unregistered dog on a pad.

For instance, Mireles is on the lookout for Termite, a white Pomeranian whose status has been unknown for about two years. There also is Brutus, a delinquent Doberman mix, and Picasso, a recalcitrant Chihuahua.

When Mireles talks to a dog owner, she is prepared with the facts. Dog owners have been known to lie.

‘They Have Three Dogs’

“They tell me they don’t have a dog, or that the dog died or something,” she said. “Then I go across the street and the neighbor tells me, ‘Hey, they have three dogs.’ ”

The job is not without its risks. Mireles said she has never been bitten by a dog, but some of her co-workers have. Dogs on the loose make her nervous. And she hesitates about leaning over fences to look for elusive canines.

“One time the dog went up the fence,” she said, “and I went up the tree.”