Board Business

Looking out for shelter pets

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this week weighed in on a narrow-but-emotional debate over euthanasia in animal shelters, urging the governor not to repeal a suspended law requiring shelters to wait more than three days before euthanizing abandoned pets and strays.  

The mandate, suspended since 2009, is one of more than 30 that Gov. Jerry Brown has sought to eliminate in the wake of the state’s budget crisis.

Signed into law in 1998 by Gov. Pete Wilson, and named for its sponsor, former Santa Monica state senator Tom Hayden, it has extended the lives of lost and stray animals by requiring shelters to hold them from four to six days, rather than the 72 hours under the prior law. Local governments are supposed to be reimbursed by the state.

As California’s economy has struggled, however, the shelter law has been a target. In 2004, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger briefly tried and failed to repeal it, and five years later, it was suspended as part of a deal to balance the state budget.  At the time, animal rights groups feared that shelters would begin euthanizing animals more quickly, but they continued to abide by longer waiting periods, making up for the lack of state reimbursement out of their own budgets.

In Los Angeles County, for instance, the Department of Animal Care and Control has spent about $600,000 a year of its $33 million budget to hold animals for five days before euthanization, says Chief Deputy Director David Dijkstra. 

“As long as we have the ability, we like to make animals available for adoption or owner redemption for as long as possible,” Dijkstra says, noting that the county impounds about 90,000 animals a year and euthanizes fewer than half of them.

Some animal rights activists have argued that Hayden’s Law has worsened conditions for shelter animals because so-called “rescue holds” by hoarders and well-intentioned but disorganized animal lovers force shelters to house aggressive and diseased animals for weeks at the expense of more adoptable pets who then end up being euthanized for lack of space.

The state also points to a 2008 report from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office that found no proof that the Hayden Law had led to an increase in pet adoptions, and therefore recommended repeal.

Still, Brown’s proposal to save more than $23 million a year by taking the mandate out of the state budget has drawn a fresh round of protest from some pet lovers and animal rights groups. Hayden recently spoke out  in a YouTube video, and the Humane Society of the United States this week asked members to write to Brown.

The Board’s response, led by Supervisor Michael Antonovich, a longstanding advocate for pet adoptions, took the form of a 5-signature letter asking that the law not be repealed.

Quantifying the local impact of Hayden’s Law has been difficult because so many variables are involved in pet adoptions. For example, in recent years, Dijkstra says, shelters have become more crowded because owners have had difficulty caring for pets in this economy. Moreover, many of the 40,000 or so animals euthanized each year in county shelters are animals such as feral cats that can’t easily be placed for adoption.

However, he notes, by the most available measure—dog impounds—the suspension of Hayden’s Law has not increased euthanasia. In 2008-09, the county impounded 45,903 dogs, with 54 percent adopted or returned to their owners. In 2011-12, the projected number of impounded dogs stands at 48,823, with 57 percent returned or adopted. 

About 80 percent of pets are claimed by their owners within the first three days, he says, but last year, about 1,100 lost pets were reunited with their owners on their fourth and fifth days in the shelter. In the past year, he adds, the county also has begun putting abandoned pets up for adoption sooner than they might otherwise have been made available.

“It’s very rare that an owner shows up after we’ve made a dog or cat available for adoption,” he adds, “but that has happened on a couple of occasions, and in those cases, the new owners are contacted and asked if they’ll give the pet back.”

Posted 2/8/12

Sergeant to the stars calls it quits

The photo captions dub him the “unidentified man,” whether he’s escorting Lindsay Lohan through a blizzard of golden confetti or guiding Mel Gibson through a gauntlet of paparazzi.

But everybody who’s anybody in Los Angeles County courthouse and government circles knows that the tall, broad-shouldered figure in those pictures is Steve Wheatcroft.

The veteran county sheriff’s sergeant has long been an unsung but essential player on the front lines of L.A.’s celebrity-media circus, bringing decorum and safety to the courtroom comings and goings of America’s most photographed.

He’s been responsible for the security of judges like Lance Ito, who presided over O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. He’s made sure that defendants like Lohan, Gibson, Phil Spector and Dr. Conrad Murray made it through media scrums and into courtrooms with a minimum of chaos. And whenever a threat is made against a Los Angeles County judge or member of the Board of

Supervisors, Wheatcroft and his team have jumped into action.

But now, after more than two decades of rubbing shoulders with L.A.’s famous and infamous, Wheatcroft is ready for a little family time.

“As they always say at the Super Bowl, I’m going to Disneyland,” said Wheatcroft, 54, who will retire in the next few weeks after more than 32 years on the job.

Instead of heading up the sheriff’s Security Operations Unit—which assesses threats on public officials, helps manage high-profile trial logistics and provides protection to supervisors and judges—he’ll be hanging with his eight (soon to be nine) grandchildren and cruising around in his black ’59 Corvette.

Leaving the job is kind of like leaving the family business for Wheatcroft, whose brother and son also work for the sheriff’s department.

More than anything, he said, he’ll miss the camaraderie of the eight-member unit that he joined back when it was just a two-man operation run out of the county marshal’s office. When the marshal’s office merged with the Sheriff’s Department in 1994, Wheatcroft’s unit took over protective services for the supervisors as well as the judges. As part of the job, he has served as sergeant-at-arms for the Board of Supervisors’ meetings and helped with logistics for visiting dignitaries ranging from Muhammad Ali to Kirk Douglas.

At Tuesday’s board meeting, the supervisors gave Wheatcroft a big send-off.

“All I can say is this is the sweetest cop you will ever meet,” said Supervisor Gloria Molina. “But that doesn’t take away the kind of commanding presence that he has had here at the board.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky saluted his professionalism and ability to “defuse situations that could have gone the other way,” including threats made against the supervisor or his staff. “You put me and my family at ease during those moments,” Yaroslavsky told Wheatcroft.

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich thanked Wheatcroft and also singled out his work in the courts. Ticking off a long list of celebrity defendants the sergeant has escorted, he noted: “You could see him in all the movie magazines.”

Which is true, actually, but doesn’t seem to have gone to his head.

Over the years, the “unidentified man” in all those photos has had the chance to observe a lot of famous people under difficult circumstances.

Lohan, Wheatcroft said, is “just kind of a confused girl” who told him she “likes to party.”

Nicest celeb? That would be Rod Stewart, whom Wheatcroft accompanied during a week-long civil proceeding at the courthouse. The British rocker was, in Wheatcroft’s words, “a humble, appreciative person.”

Close followers of the O.J. Simpson case may remember the time the jury, lawyers and judge in the so-called “trial of the century” took a field trip to Simpson’s Rockingham Avenue estate. Wheatcroft arranged it. He did the same with an excursion to Vitello’s restaurant during the Robert Blake case.

And—as if Los Angeles County didn’t have enough of its own well-known defendants—Wheatcroft has been called in to advise officials elsewhere in the U.S.and Canada on how to handle high-profile proceedings. He’s written on the subject in Officer magazine.

By his side throughout has been his high-school sweetheart and now-wife, Wanda. After the board send-off Tuesday, she said her husband had often shared tales from his star-studded work over the years.

“But only in an entertaining way,” she said, “never in a complaining way.”

Posted 11/30/11

The greening of L.A.’s Civic Center

The giant yuccas haven’t moved in yet, and neither have the California Pepper, Japanese Pagoda or Strawberry Snowball trees.

But make no mistake, the downtown park project is definitely entering its green period.

The first trees are now taking root in the 12-acre expanse in the heart of the Civic Center—the first visible manifestation of the ambitious Grand Avenue Project intended to create a cultural and civic sense of place in downtown Los Angeles. Since July, 50 of 373 new trees have been planted, joining the 95 that were left in place on the site when work began in 2010. (Many of the new trees are varieties of palm, and there also are dozens of California sycamores and Tipuana tipu trees in the arboreal lineup, along with eight coast live oaks and a wide range of other varieties.) Landscaping on the project is expected to continue through next May.

The park, scheduled to open next summer, will represent a dramatic transformation of a once banal stretch of downtown public space, creating an “iconic” and “spectacular” gathering spot for diverse activities ranging from picnicking to big-screen musical simulcasts. Stretching in three sections from the Music Center to City Hall, the park’s ADA-accessible ramps will complement a series of stairs, terraces and lawns.

The tree planting has picked up pace lately. Newly-installed palm trees (some weighing 15,000 pounds each) and silvery-leafed olive trees are now ensconced near the park’s new Starbucks building (which adds its own blast of green to the landscape thanks to its bright chartreuse slanted roof.)

The Board of Supervisors this week approved an amended 10-year agreement with Starbucks increasing the company’s monthly rent to reflect the new, larger 1,195-square-foot space; it will go to $3,585, from $2,250. Since business is expected to increase once the new park is open, the county—which will receive 6% of the coffee concession’s annual gross sales above $717,000—anticipates that its take will go up as well. The total annual revenue for the county, including the rent, is projected to be about $70,800 a year, the report said

The current Starbucks, long a fixture of daily life for jurors and Civic Center employees, will be leveled when the new facility is ready for business.

Also coming down soon will be the wooden barricades and concrete “k-rail” barriers that have closed off the Grand Avenue end of the project for months. The Grand Avenue sidewalk, which also has been closed, will be reopened on Monday, November 14, along with a mid-block crosswalk that leads to the Music Center and the Grand Avenue ramps to the Hall of Administration parking lot.

Dawn McDivitt, who is overseeing the project for the county’s Chief Executive Office, said other signs of progress also are on the way. For example, she said, one of the park’s hallmark features, the restored Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain, should be ready for testing around the first of the year.

“It is exciting to see many features of the park taking shape,” she said. Updated 11/10/11: See for yourself in the most recent construction photos from the site.

Posted 11/2/11

The last map standing

After weeks of robust debate that sparked thousands of letters, e-mails and public comments, Los Angeles County’s most contentious redistricting process in a generation came to a dramatic close Tuesday as supervisors voted 4-1 to approve new political boundaries that hew relatively closely to the current map.

The supervisors voted after hearing six hours of public testimony from 243 speakers who invoked the history of Latinos in L.A., the meaning of changing demographics and sharply divergent opinions on whether “racially polarized voting” still exists in the county to such an extent that it denies Latinos an equal opportunity to elect a person of their choosing. Others asked supervisors to preserve existing “communities of interest” so that neighborhood priorities such as protecting the environment and building health care networks would not be jeopardized.

In approving the redistricting map known as A3, supervisors rejected competing proposals by Supervisors Gloria Molina and Mark Ridley-Thomas that had sought to create a second supervisorial district in which Latinos make up a majority of the citizen voting age population.

In an initial round of voting toward the end of Tuesday’s meeting, it became clear that none of the proposed maps would receive the 4-1 “supermajority” vote needed to pass. So, after a brief closed session and some minor amendments to the A3 plan offered by Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, Ridley-Thomas signaled he would change his vote.

“There is a rather obvious lack of consensus on a map here today,” Ridley-Thomas said. With a possible legal challenge from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund looming, he said he wanted to avoid a “potentially divisive delay” and to push the matter toward the “closure” of a federal court ruling on what the Voting Rights Act required.

While he said he still believed in the plans he and Molina had put forward, he said he wanted to avert “the unnecessary gamble of the uncertainty of an untested appeal process”—a reference to the special redistricting commission made up of the District Attorney, Assessor and Sheriff that would have stepped in to decide the matter if the five-member Board of Supervisors had been unable to muster four votes for any of the proposals. After Ridley-Thomas’ change of course, the board voted 4-1 in favor of the A3 plan, with Molina casting the dissenting vote.

Ridley-Thomas’ S2 map and Molina’s T1 proposal would have moved up to 3.5 million residents to new electoral homes and split the San Fernando Valley into three supervisorial districts instead of the current two. The plans drew strong reactions across the county, and were criticized as blatant gerrymandering by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and others.

Knabe, in remarks before the vote, said that his A3 plan was the best way to ensure all groups in the county are well-represented. More radical boundary changes, he said, weren’t legally necessary and don’t reflect modern-day electoral realities.

“We cannot hold onto the past when we see clear illustrations of change with the election of minority candidates at every level of government,” Knabe said. “Hanging onto the legal battles of 20 years ago does nothing to move us forward…At the end of the day our job, as elected officials, is to represent all ethnicities, all people in Los Angeles County.”

Molina, however, in a presentation before the vote, contended that creating a second “meaningful Latino opportunity district” was required under the federal Voting Rights Act because of current demographics and a long history of bias.

“The legacy of Latino political exclusion and discrimination in L.A. County is so pervasive,” she said, “that it has affected not only the way Latinos and Latino candidates are perceived by non-Latinos but the way Latinos perceive their own ability to participate in the political process.”

Map A3, she said, waters down the voting strength of Latinos by creating a large Latino majority only in her 1^st District while keeping their numbers to a third, or lower, in the other four districts. Latinos make up nearly 48% of the population countywide, and about a third of the county’s citizens of voting age.

Yaroslavsky kept his remarks brief, saying he had already written or said just about everything he needed to on the issue. But he thanked the community for what he called “this unprecedented turnout” and for the level of discourse throughout the process. “On the whole it was an elevated public testimony that we heard and it contributed to the public understanding … of what’s before us,” he said.

More than 900 people turned out for the meeting, arriving in the early morning, filling the board hearing room and spilling into three overflow rooms and a large white tent erected on the Hall of Administration lawn.

But by the time the final vote was taken just after 6 p.m., only a handful of spectators remained to witness the moment—the culmination of the once-every-decade process in which boundaries are redrawn to reflect U.S. Census data. (Click here for our story on the day-long civics lesson for hundreds of students who attended the meeting.)

The new district boundaries take effect in 30 days. Here are some of the changes in store forLos Angeles County under the plan:

More than 277,000 people will move to new districts, and several communities will get a new supervisor. Claremont, for instance, will move from the 5^th District to the 1^st. Santa Fe Springs will move from the 1^st to the 4^th.

Several other communities, now split between two supervisors, will be consolidated. The lake area of Silverlake will no longer be in the 3^rd District, for instance; instead, the whole community will be drawn into the 1^st District, as will all of Pico Rivera, Azusa and West Covina. Similarly, the 2^nd District will encompass all of Hawthorne and all of Florence/Firestone, and the 4^th District will include all of South Whittier and West Whittier/Nietos.

The San Fernando Valley will continue to make up more than 50% of the 3^rd District’s electorate, and the 3^rd District also will continue to represent the Westside, Hollywood and the Santa Monica Mountains. The 3^rd District will lose 15,468 people, creating a district that is 45.8% white, 37.9% Latino, 11.1% Asian/Pacific Islander and 4% African American.

The population of voting-aged Latino citizens will fall in the 1^st District from 63.3% of the electorate to 59.7%. In the 4^th District, it will rise slightly from 31.6% of the electorate to 32.8%.

Asian Pacific Islanders, who had expressed concerns that redistricting would dilute their representation, will continue to be concentrated in the 1^st, 4^th and 5^th Districts, with the highest concentration of voting-aged API citizens in the 1^st District at 19%.

Population also will be more evenly distributed among the districts under the plan adopted Tuesday. Prior to A3’s approval, the largest district, the 5^th, had 2,088,786 people, while the smallest, the 1^st, had 1,893,001. That deviation, about 10%, will be reduced under the new plan to 1.57%.

Posted 9/27/11

A hearing—and a civics lesson, too

Hilda Placencia got a lesson in the complexities of political representation. Jesse Almaraz learned that government isn’t necessarily dull. Christopher Trujillo discovered that, when it comes to civic engagement, it helps to be a morning person.

“We were the first ones into the building,” the 18-year-old El Monte student noted, planting himself in a choice seat in the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration. “But we had to be ready to go at 5:45 a.m.”

Tuesday’s public hearing on redistricting was many things to many people—a referendum on social justice, a call for a geographic balance of power, a refresher course on Los Angeles County’s shifting demography.

But for hundreds of adolescents packed into the audience—some bused in by community organizers, some carpooled in with their high school teachers—the marathon meeting was a daylong civics lesson.

“My teacher explained it to us, but this is explaining it better,” said Placencia, a 16-year-old senior (“Class of 2012!”) who was part of a contingent from Schurr High School in Montebello. “I learned more today here at this meeting than I did all day yesterday.”

More than 900 people showed up in the early morning to applaud,  testify and otherwise weigh in on three rival plans for redrawing the county’s supervisorial boundaries. By the time the Board of Supervisors voted to adopt an amended version of plan A3, which mostly follows the current boundaries, it was dinner time.

But one of the most striking aspects of the crowd was its youth.

One section was packed with row upon row of students bused in from job training programs in Supervisor Don Knabe’s Fourth District. Another was filled with 50 blue-shirted teenagers and young adults who came from the San Gabriel Valley Conservation Corps in Supervisor Gloria Molina’s First District in a convoy of vans.

A classroom of students from Bell Gardens High School, escorted by Molina staff members, shuttled in and out, politely observing until mid-afternoon, when their school day ended; later, the supervisor—whose own Latino-majority district had been created as the result of a redistricting lawsuit—clambered onto a Roosevelt High School bus to thank still more young people for coming.

Teenagers being teenagers, of course, few could name their supervisors—a problem that afflicts some adults as well. But that didn’t dampen their interest. At one point, Placencia and a group of friends from Schurr High found themselves in a tutorial on how redistricting can affect environmental policies as well as ethnic power—a conversation that started when they found themselves seated next to Rosie Dagit, senior conservation biologist with the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains.

At Dagit’s suggestion, the students began examining wall maps delineating the proposals. Soon they were talking to Topanga environmentalist Ken Wheeland, who was sitting nearby. They listened attentively as Wheeland—his denim work shirt decorated with a small sage-green ribbon to demonstrate his concern for mountain preservation—explained that he feared the environment would take a backseat to commercial interests if the mountains were placed in the same district as the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

As their conversation wound down, Wheeland also shared some adult political perspective, saying that no matter what map won, “there’ll probably be a lawsuit and a judge will decide.”

The students then returned to their seats, periodically peppering Wheeland’s fellow environmentalist, Dagit, with questions as the surrounding crowd waved signs for the redistricting plan backed by Molina.

“I told them, ‘I’m not here to tell you what to think—you should make your own decisions, think about what’s important to you, look at the maps, listen to the testimony’,” Dagit reported. “About halfway through, three of them asked us for green ribbons.”

Elsewhere in the audience, 18-year-old art student Jesse Almaraz of Long Beach sketched as he listened to the proceedings. A student at Urban Arts Crew, a South Bay job training program supported by Knabe, Almaraz said he wanted his supervisor to remain the same.

“If our district were to change,” he said, “we might lose our funding. I’m all for equal representation or whatever, but I don’t feel that only Latinos can represent Latinos.”

What surprised him and his friends most, he said, was the vigor with which all the groups defended their positions.

“I thought this would be kind of a quiet thing but people keep making noise and shaking signs,” he marveled. “I wish we had some signs, man. That would be cool.”

Across the aisle,Trujillo and the Conservation Corps contingent stayed almost to the end of the proceedings.

“It’s a lot of information,” the teenager said. “But I’m learning a lot about what’s fair and what’s not fair. Some of it sounds right and some sound wrong, but I’m just gonna support Molina. I’m listening so I can prepare for the next time this comes around.”

And one bit of preparation he’d repeat, he said, was fortification for a long siege.

“Burritos and fruit snacks,” he recommended. “Stayin’ strong.”

Posted 9/27/11

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