Officials to Hear Shelter’s Reply to Accusations

Nearly seven weeks after a county grand jury delivered a report condemning the management of Riverside’s county-operated animal shelter, the Board of Supervisors today will review the official response from shelter executives.

The grand jury raised 28 allegations against the shelter, including claims that animals are regularly euthanized before owners can be contacted or potential adopters can take the animals home and that animals and workers are in jeopardy because of inadequate safety precautions.

The report also faulted shelter executives for failing to address morale problems and for “causing substantial emotional stress” by assigning employees to work 30-day rotations euthanizing animals.

Janis McLaughlin, the shelter’s executive director, has repeatedly defended the shelter and herself.

“I don’t feel I’ve done anything I need to be ashamed of,” she said at a December community meeting, a week after the report came out.

In the draft response to the grand jury, shelter executives rejected most of the report’s findings, arguing that many of the allegations were untrue or have been addressed since the report was released in December.

“There’s some sloppiness here, but there’s no evidence that there is mismanagement,” said Supervisor Bob Buster, who sits on the shelter’s advisory board. “Rather than any systematic mismanagement, what it indicates to me is an organization that has been stretched by a lack of funding and by population growth in the county.”

But community activists and shelter employees have insisted that the problems plaguing the shelter, which is overseen by the county’s Community Health Agency on a contract basis for the city of Riverside, are the result of gross mismanagement.

“It’s just baloney,” said Katie Wider, a Riverside resident who runs a local spay-neuter program and who resigned from the shelter’s advisory board last year. “They are wasteful and inefficient. More money is not going to solve the problem.”

The shelter, which takes in about 22,000 animals each year, has an operating budget of more than $2 million, according to county officials. The city of Riverside pays about $1.7 million of it.

An internal audit completed last week by the county controller’s office uncovered minor accounting inconsistencies but found that, overall, controls on appropriations were sufficient.

Supervisors, anticipating debate about the depth of the shelter’s problems, approved funding in December for an independent operational audit of the facility.

At today’s meeting, they will also vote on whether to appoint two supervisors to sit on a citizens’ committee to review the audit results.

Wider said she was glad the grand jury report had provoked a response from the board and the shelter but said she thought the response did not reflect the degree of concern she thought the initial allegations warranted.

“This is not the report I was looking for,” Wider said.