The Incredible Shrinking Pound

Did you think, like I did, that the reason for allocating funds and approving construction of a new animal control facility in PG County was largely to increase the capacity for sheltering dogs and cats?  Did you think that the new shelter would hold twice as many animals as the old one?  Did you feel that the millions of dollars of hard-earned tax dollars of County citizens was worth while because of the improved care and space for the animals that find themselves waiting there for their owners' claim?

In this early news article, AMD claims that the old building, in Forestville, MD, accommodated "up to 160 animals."  The hope expressed in the article was to double that in the building to be sited in Upper Marlboro.  That facility opened its doors in 2009.  According to what a task force in the City of Bowie was told soon after it opened, 250 dogs and 150 cats could be housed in the Upper Marlboro facility.  Let's see.  Add 250 to 150 and you come up with four hundred (400).  That's MORE than double the "up to 160" number of the old shelter, isn't it?

BUT WAIT!!!!  LAST WINTER, THE PG AMD FACILITY SHRUNK!!!  STOP THE PRESSES!!

Now, the Taylor/Wynkoop twins want you to believe the absolute capacity, in the worst disaster, and ONLY then, is, something like 326.  Yes, that's right, not 300, not 325, not 400.  But three hundred and twenty six.  Oh, that doesn't (I think) seem to include the "20 additional cages if necessary" or the "10 animals" or the "10 reptile/fish pets" that the Exotic room is claimed to be fit for.  So, er, in a disaster PG can now house 326, plus "if necessary" (but not in a disaster?!?!?) 20 plus 10 animals plus 10 reptile/fish pets.  So the capacity might be -- supposing always that Taylor/Wynkoop is thinking "straight," 366.  But NOT 400. And in NON-disasters?  It is a measly 238 animals.  Just 78 more than the small, dingy, old building.  Aaaaand, our tax dollars paid very handsomely for this 78 more animal capacity.  Really handsomely.

If you supported the construction of the new facility, and expected that it would provide safety for the pets of a growing County population, would you feel duped by this new revelation, that the PG shelter cost millions but only provides for 78 more animals?  (And if you're left with your head spinning over the various small counts in our last paragraph, I'm sorry -- it's taken directly from the Taylor/Wynkoop response to the simple question, "What barriers exist, if any, to creating flexible capacity (i.e., placing multiple animals in single cages) when the shelter is experiencing a high volume of animal intakes?"

You should know, that it is entirely humane and practical to expect animal care and control personnel to know how to create flexible capacity.  Litters of kittens or puppies can be housed together, and the mother cat or dog can usually also be housed with the litter.  Animals impounded together, often are MORE calm and comfortable when housed together so they have warmth and familiar companions. 

But even putting aside the question of why DER/AMD can't imagine any way of saving animal lives; even ignoring the question of just what exactly taxpayers and the County Budget paid for; the bigger concern may be, why can't Taylor/Wynkoop answer a simple question the same way twice?  What happened that made the new PG shelter shrink? 

Analysis, Accountability, Innovation

County Executive Rushern Baker launched the public side of CountyStat this morning.  It is an adaptation of similar "stat" programs (short for "statistics") in other jurisdictions, including the State of Maryland.  Although a feature of the website is the analysis and charts of County agency performance data, maybe the most welcome news is that CountyStat does provide more actual data than has probably ever been freely accessible by members of the public or the media.  In addition, the CountyStat model includes an open process, in which meetings between County leadership and agency personnel are open to the public, and documents transmitted as part of analyzing effectiveness are shared openly.

The idea is to keep an eye on what the County is doing right, and acknowledge it, but also to keep close tabs on what needs improvement, and to engage in friendly "borrowing" from other jurisdictions if their approaches show more success for the community.

Of particular interest to us at George of Denmark, is that the DER Animal Management Division is, for the first time, being asked some questions that we think better reflect the concerns that County residents have about hw dogs, cats, and other animals are being treated by County facilities, especially the impound facility.  You can check out some of the CountyStat data on this here, in a DER memo responding to various questions, and you can see all of the CountyStat analysis and documents made public to date at the County's webpage here.

I'd be very interested in your impressions as you read the analyses, and I will be posting mine as I review at least some of them.  Stay Tuned!

Maryland's Wisconsin? Or why contracting costs more

In the Washington Post Ezra Klein recently wrote about a new study that shows that at the federal government level, contracting-out of jobs winds up costing more than doing the same work in-house (i.e., using employees rather than contractors).  We're not surprised.

Since 2009, if not a bit before that, employment practices at the PG pound have been worrisome.  The animal control positions are pretty straightforward-looking, at least, on paper.  There are Field Supervisor positions, which are management classifications, and there are several grades of animal control "officers," all of them non-management, non-supervisory jobs, all classified positions, with job descriptions neatly filed and administered, if not necessarily showing a very impressive workforce development vision.  They mostly require graduation from high school, and not much more.

Since the summer of '09, though, the County has claimed that it would be number ONE in the nation.  Most people would assume that to mean not ONLY that the building would be bright and airy though.  Most people would think it meant that it would house animals in clean, sanitary, healthy spaces, where they could interact naturally, be seen to their very best advantage.  You'd think it would mean that the policies would be clear, humane, and even progressive.  You'd want them to be saving the lives of animals, not hauling 'em in and killing 'em.

To collect and enforce against animals interacting with people, you may need a bunch of high school graduates who can take direction without question. 

To care for animals, to promote them for new homes and to provide them with great vet care and socialization and interaction, though, you need different skillsets completely.  You may not need higher formal degrees, but you definitely need some skills that you don't find in just any cashier at 7-11 or for that matter, in someone who likes to ride around the County roads, eating donuts.  So, it's troubling that since 2009, a small group of workers doing work for a PG county agency, have been treated a lot like slaves.

There are no classifications for shelter workers in PG County personnel law.  There aren't provisions to determine what marks a supervisory shelter worker from any other shelter worker.  There is no career path -- you just work, collect your pay if you're lucky, and hope you aren't terminated.  Many of the people who wash kennels, walk and feed dogs and cats, or decide which animals to kill or keep, are apparently working on what are called "personal services contracts" with the Department of Environmental Resources.

Some of these workers -- we can't call them employees, remember, because they have virtually no rights -- worked previously for the group that contracted for "kennel care" with the county.  They went from working for a small, private company, and possibly, having some flexibility in negotiating about their working situations, to working for the County, but as individuals with no real power to counter the bureaucracy of the County purchasing, procurement, HR, and personnel organizations. 

Think about your own work experiences.  If you have ever worked in jobs where you were paid for piecework, or where you were simply a commission-taker, or where there was no "next step" in sight, you may remember how lazy and unmotivated it can make a person feel.  When you know for sure that the best you can hope for is to not get a pink slip, you resort to working and just going through the motions.  That's probably the way most of the workers on contracts at the pound feel.

Now, if this were the situation for the first year in which the County had total control of the pound and its operation, that would be one thing.  However, it's now been over two years.  Surely, at the compensation levels of the PG County 1 percenters, the "managers" in the County Executive Branch, if we were going to see career plans and vision and mission and a real sense of shared goals and drive, you'd have seen that by now.  You would have seen a lot of personal services contract jobs transforming into County employee positions.  You'd see promising people hired, and you'd see them earning leave and other benefits, that as "personal services contractors," they are entirely without.

Not only is the state of things a very accurate reflection of the capabilities of the current holders of official positions of authority.  It's also a really bad situation for the workers.  And it's really bad for the County and its animal population.

The more animals you have in a building, the more quickly disease can spread.  The importance of thorough and careful cleaning increases.  But workers who don't have a future, don't pay a lot of attention to thoroughness or take a lot of care.  PG's pound is notorious among area rescues for being dirty -- this EVEN after the move into the new building! -- and for animals from that pound being sick.  It isn't that PG county pet owners have sicker animals!  No, rather, it's that the sanitation in the pound we paid dearly to build and maintain, is very poor because the workers who clean it are also poor. 

The more eager your animal control is to collect up all animals, the more animals you'll have in a pound facility.  Animal control doesn't find homes or clean or feed those animals, however.  It is the kennel workers who care for the animals.  It's the kennel staff who provide routine health treatments and it's the kennel staff who devise exit routes for the animals that are other than in a barrel.

Why do we pay a "manager" $127K when he does nothing to manage programs and has virtually no staff?  And why couldn't that money be put toward some real purposes in providing meaningful rewards -- health benefits, anyone?  pension contributions? -- for people who work every day in order to find new homes, get animals into rescue and foster care, clean kennels, and feed and care for the animals.

Watch this space for more on the contracting situation.  Last fiscal year, not a single one of the contracts involving the PG pound were reported to the public nor to the County Council.  We're going to be shining a light on where those funds are going and how they're being reviewed and how that's affecting workers.

Same old worn-out excuses

County Executive Rushern Baker campaigned on taking Prince George's County from GOOD to GREAT.

But time and again, Baker's County Government lets Baker, and his constituents, down.  George of Denmark was recently provided access to an exchange between a County resident and Mr. Samuel E. Wynkoop, JR., Director of the Department of Environmental Resources.

The subject of the letter is the "euthanasia rate" as Wynkoop phrases it -- or rather, the rate at which animals are killed -- at the PG pound.  Coming as Wynkoop does from another era, an era long ago, maybe it isn't surprising that he offers platitudes and placating excuses.  He offers no evidence that he comprehends the idea of setting goals and devising steps that will reach or exceed them.

It struck me, that Wynkoop solicitously protects the staff in AMD by describing what was done to a thousand, seven hundred and thirty-nine animals in the month of June 2011, as "euthanasia."  Yet not one of the component numbers that Wynkoop then cites as "causes for" killing the animals in question, would truly qualify as "euthanasia."


But more fundamentally, it struck me that, IF ONLY Wynkoop would act to put work in motion to stop the killing, he would not NEED to shield his employees by prettying up the killing by reframing it as euthanasia!

Here is the awful rundown of what Wynkoop and his people have achieved:

• Failed in 81 instances to establish a behavior training program 
• Failed in 143 instances to provide adequate veterinary treatment
• Failed in 55 cases to provide for independent, qualified assessment of owner relinquished animals
• Failed in an astonishing 204 instances to provide or refer to community cat control programs
• Failed in 36 instances to competently distinguish dangerous animals from "pit bull type" physical characteristics
• Failed in 161 instances to provide simple foster care for young puppies and kittens -- shameful!
• Failed in 193 instances to seek proactively to reunite pets with owners or place them in new homes

 Uh, well.  At least those numbers DO sum to 873, which is the portion Wynkoop claims of the 1739 intake that were "domestic animals."  What the others are, among "cats, dogs, small mammals, reptiles, wildlife, livestock and carcasses," Wynkoop makes no mention.   Yet THEIR number apparently amounts to a significant 866!  It's puzzling to me why this agency just can't provide a full answer to any question at all!  No mention whatsoever is made of any intelligence that Wynkoop grasps even after accounting to the resident in this way.  That's pretty amazing for a presumably wise old man.

After the litany of "woulda coulda shoulda" that he offers with those statistics, Wynkoop goes on to say that "Our mission and goal has always been to reduce euthanasia by reducing the intake of animals."  Well, that simply isn't factual.  The mission of DER has been stated, in budget documents produced by Wynkoop, as to protect public health, or to safeguard people and animals, that kind of thing.  Not once under Wynkoop's tenures (either then, or now) has "reducing intake" been a publicly-stated goal.  Not only that, but even as he makes the claim about "mission and goals" to us, he then contradicts himself, saying that the "current goals are listed below" and not indicating any connection between the three "goals" he lists, and the "mission and goals" intake reduction he mentioned earlier.

For curious readers, here is the stated mission from the County DER website today:  "The mission of the Department of Environmental Resources is to protect and enhance the natural and built environments of Prince George's County by enforcing Federal, State and County laws to create a healthy, safe and esthetically pleasing environment for all residents and businesses of the County."  The Animal Management Division pages offer no mission or goals whatsoever, by the way.

It is a cardinal rule that keeping your goal in mind helps you to act to reach that goal.  Keeping multiple, conflicting goals is practically a formula for failure.  And Wynkoop and his DER and AMD continue to bear that out.

Seasoned observers of the Department and of AMD have noticed that whenever questions arise about metrics or outcomes, and particularly around budget reporting, the response is to change the goals!  Yes, that's right, they just play a shell game with PG Citizens!

In order to stop the killing (and we don't object to Wynkoop wanting not to inflict harm on his staff BUT we insist that he face the fact that they are killing animals, NOT "providing euthanasia" services in MOST instances), DER and AMD need to act on what AMD managers should have learned, when they were provided with the benefit of attending last year's No Kill Conference.  They need to do the work of launching real programs that stop the killing.

It's very simple to know what needs to be done.  It's not anything that hasn't already been done and proven by dozens .... and dozens .... of places both near and far where communities have taken their pounds back from the killers.

We don't want excuses. 

Can you hear us now?

Two years ago, the last contractor for kennel care had had enough.  County animal care has been contracted out for several decades, twice to organizations with professional private practice licensed Veterinarians in management roles.  In July 2009, the County was about to open a brand new, highly-touted impound facility, known as the Animal Services Facility.  The head of animal control wanted to be in more COMPLETE control.

Citizens and animal welfare groups, it turns out, were right to be worried that the fox might be guarding the hen house once Rodney Taylor took full charge.  While the County promised to operate the new facility on the same budget it got to run the old, very dilapidated Forestville building, it also promised to increase staff.  What was unspoken, is that the increases in staff would be through contracting-out. 

Contracting makes sense in some circumstances.  For short-term projects, for efforts that require special skills but only for a particular project, for cases where there isn't any reason to develop a workforce.  But contracting out kennel work has led to an environment where every worker can be replaced at whim, and where no one cares any more than the leaders care about animals and their welfare.  And when the leaders only care about counting citations, well, it is a very bad day for compassionate workers, as well as for animals.

If Taylor did in fact increase staff, it is hard to tell it from here.  He continues to complain of being short-staffed at any criticism, and the metrics of the County's animal care and control work are still carbon copies of those from long before the opening of the new facility.

It cannot be surprising the Sam Wynkoop, the Director of the Department of Environmental Resources, resuming his old role as Taylor's boss, that the County pales in comparison to many places today, including where animal issues are concerned. 

If it IS a surprise, the County bureaucrats are in for a shock when they read the comments and see the signatures on this online petition.  Let's hope that someone understands that changing the reputation of the County includes changing its reputation with rescues and adopters across the entire metro region!

Whew!

In a day that I'm sure the Council did not anticipate would be quite as long as it was, the Prince George's County Council confirmed five new Department Directors while meeting across the County Administration Building today.  The Council hearing room on the second floor apparently had connectivity, and the flat-panel screens were functioning as were the microphones in that room.  I don't know whether the technology was back in service down in the Council meeting room, but I did notice that my cell phone couldn't tweet out.

Most of the crowd -- and there was quite a crowd -- seems to have been present for the Fire/EMS Chief appointment, though a few must have been Central Services Fans.  I couldn't particularly identify anyone else interested in DER, although Mr. Wynkoop's wife and two granddaughters attended.  Two gentlemen who both are associated with developers testified on Wynkoop's appointment.  Council Members voted based on the strength of County Exec Baker's faith in Wynkoop, and several Council Members voiced distress that plans and products they requested from DER had only been provided at the "eleventh hour."  They promised to see that Wynkoop makes really significant changes in that department.

A tad peculiar ...

Well, Sam Wynkoop, once and future Director of the Prince George's County Department of Environmental Resources (DER) is still acting in his position, at least, for a few more days.  But wait!  What IS it about this particular Baker appointment?

The Wynkoop nomination was struck from the agenda for the County Council's standing Transportation, Housing and Environment Committee last time we looked.  And now, here is the full Council agenda for the Tuesday the 12th.  There, it says the appointment of Wynkoop as DER top man will be considered after a Council of the Whole session on the ELEVENTH.  But the Council's calendar for July 11 is already looking full, what with a District Council session and then a hearing on another matter.  And what do they mean when the Agenda reports that there will be a verbal report made, out of the Council of the Whole?

Why does this make a fan of transparency feel woozy?  Because it seems that at the very least, if Baker plans to install Wayne Curry people across the County government, the least the Council could do is allow citizens to listen in and follow the appointment process.  The way this is scheduled it's hard to tell what will happen when, whether Wynkoop's appointment will be considered in any public forum, or even when we'll get to know whether the man's been confirmed or not.

Looks to us as though the public hearing itself is set for the County Council regular meeting day, on Tuesday; but the appointment interview may be what the Council of the Whole will be doing on MONDAY morning.