Ed Boks is the General Manager of Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS).

Ed Boks pretends to care about converting LAAS into a no-kill system of sheltering, but all that he has done is cost the TAXPAYERS of Los Angeles their hard-earned MONEY, with his questionable programs and undocumented spending.

The taxpayers of Los Angeles recently paid for a new shelter in the San Fernando Valley. The shelter (paid for by the taxpayers) is complete, but will not be opened to the public, because as Boks claims, there is a “city-wide fiscal crisis”. It is true that in the two years Ed Boks has been leading LAAS, he has created a budget deficit of $2.5 million dollars. It is not true however, that the deficit is the result of a “city-wide fiscal crisis”. In the two years Boks has been GM of LAAS, he has failed to enforce LA’s dog licensing law. Per LA city comptroller Laura Chick, the Department of Animal Services failed to collect $2.4 million dollars, over the past two years, by not enforcing that law. The licensing law is one of the largest sources of income for the Department. Per Chick’s audit, there are close to 800,000 dogs in Los Angeles, but only 100,000+ of those dogs are licensed. Aside from the fact that Boks failed to collect the license fee from 700,000 people in LA with dogs, he has created questionable programs, requiring funding that does not add up. Per Chick’s audit, undocumented spending in LAAS is rampant.

The kill rate in the Los Angeles shelters is up, a fact that Boks tries to hide by creatively disguising his numbers. Boks claims that 4.3 animals, per 1000 residents of LA, were killed in 2007. Why would anyone compare the number of animals killed, to the number of residents in the city? Using that method of analysis, Boks could kill every animal who enters the shelters, and as long as the population of LA increases, the number of animals killed compared to LA residents, would go down. The correct method for tracking shelter kill rates is to divide the number of animals killed per year, by the number of animals who entered the shelter that same year.

Boks has a good reason for maneuvering around the true kill rate of LAAS. The true kill rate of LAAS is close to 42%, a number that is higher than Boks’ predecessor, Guerdon Stuckey. In fact, all of Boks’ predecessors ran LAAS on a smaller budget, with fewer employees, and smaller facilities, yet they still managed to operate the Department without deficit, as well as decrease the kill rate in small increments every year from 2002 to 2005. Since 2006, when Boks took over as GM, the kill rate has been slightly higher than the 2005 kill rate of Boks’ predecessor, Stuckey.

Ed Boks is cheating the taxpayers of Los Angeles and he is killing animals at record rates.

Please sign the petition to fire the incompetent General Manager of LAAS!

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/15/stop-the-killing-at-laas-fire-ed-boks

Please pass on the link to the petition, to as many people as possible, and help end Ed Boks’ two-year reign of terror!!!!