ALERT RECIEVED

 

Forwarded to ADL-LA:

A summary of the 1st "No Kill Workshop" held by Ed Boks last Wednesday night;  it was PATHETIC! 

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Ed Boks is the reason LAAS keeps killing more and more animals.  After 2 1/2 years with Ed Boks in charge of LAAS, CNN reported in June that LAAS' kill rate is UP 31%. Hoping to distract from and cover-up his failure, Boks is now staging no-kill "workshops" for the public. Boks' idea has a problem: most people are sick and tired of his lies and won't waste their time on Ed Boks 'gatherings.' 

The schedule for these so-called workshops reads like a checklist of  Boks' failures: 

Spay/neuter:
(the subject of the first meeting:) He has SIX brand new spay/neuter clinics city taxpayers just spent a fortune to build at the new shelters, and he is not operating ANY of them.  

Volunteers:  
After Ed Boks extorted a $20,000 contract by the city to pay for his friend to change the volunteer program, the program became a shambles of disorganization and lost the help of volunteers for the animals. 

Feral cat TNR:
Ed Boks has done absolutely NOTHING for ferals.  Kill rate for feral cats has been climbing since Bok's arrival.

Rescue groups:
Ed Boks took the old Adoption Partners program, made it worse, and foisted a lot of extra work on people who should be spending their time helping animals. 

Pet Retention:
Ed Boks has not started one single program for pet retention. 

 

The list goes on and on. (Budget management is not on the schedule but Ed Boks has been a disaster in that area too.) 

    This first "workshop" last Wednesday night, August 6, 2008 was pitiful. Ed Boks called it "historic."  Sure Ed, very historic.  Historic for showing what an ineffective GM you are, and historic for showing how little faith everyone has in you.  About 2/3 of the way into the boring hour and a half workshop, Rabbi Freehling, the "facilitator", says the crowd is smaller than expected. No kidding, Rabbi.  Who wants to go see Ed Boks blather on with his lies?   

    34 total bodies showed up in the room at this "historic" event. Of those 34, fifteen were there because they had to be, either as part of the presentation or as part of their job. LAAS sent General Manager Ed Boks, Assistant General Manager Kathy Davis, the head of Field Operations, the Acting Chief Veterinarian, the Director of Shelter Operations and more to this colossal waste of time. Also on the payroll for the meeting were two city videographers to record the historically "dismal" event. Another individual paid to be there was the head of the city's Human Relations Committee to serve as a second facilitator!  Plus five panelists, including another city employee.  After the 15 who were there because it's their job, that left 19 who were there by choice. Of those, 7 were known to be already part of the humane community, leaving no more than 12 at the most who were there to learn or add anything new. 

What does it say about an animal services "leader" in a city of four million people who cannot get more than 19 people to show up for this highly advertised meeting?  The meeting was even promoted with a full story and photo in the LA Times by Villaraigosa's bootlicker journalist Carla Hall (a source confirmed to ADL-LA that Hall has been promised a one on one interview with the Mayor if she gives Boks' positive coverage in the Times.) 

The truth is, everyone except Antonio Villaraigosa knows there is no point in listening to Ed Boks unless you enjoy being lied to, and no point in suggesting anything because he is too incompetent to turn good ideas into solutions, especially sustainable ones. 

In contrast, Nathan Winograd hosts no-kill meetings and gets standing room only crowds in the hundreds. Ed Boks couldn't get more than 19 from the public, using his best efforts, his city E-Mail blasts, his city blog and the Los Angeles Times. Even the facilitator commented about how small the group was. He asked everyone to come forward to gather in the front seats, obviously so the city video would not show how badly attended Boks' "historic" meeting was! 

    Ed blathered on about progress the city has made with animals ( none due to any ideas Ed Boks had). Three of the panelists (Sue Taylor, Teri Austin and Lori Weise) all do quite a bit of work to improve spay/neuter in Los Angeles, despite Ed Boks). One of two other panelists was LAAS' person who issues the spay/neuter vouchers that are so difficult to find and obtain.   

     WHY does Ed Boks need no-kill workshops to figure out how to help reduce his daily slaughter?  At more than $165,000 a year, shouldn't he know? After 2 ½ years, shouldn't he have done something about the killing rather than have euthanasia reported as UP 31%? 

     Ed Boks has done nothing that has helped the LA shelters; except maybe the "ice cream social" he held at one shelter! However that too was another Boks P.R. fraud, as he moves the most adoptable animals to one shelter and the animals he can't get adopted to other shelters to be killed. The plan is to declare that the ice cream social shelter is "no-kill". Anyone can cherry-pick animals and make the shelter no-kill, just like the lies he pulled in Maricopa with one phony no-kill shelter while all his other shelters were slaughtering those he did not cherry-pick. (That fakery is part of the reason Maricopa told Ed Boks to leave ASAP!) 

     WHY does the community have so little respect for Ed Boks that they won't even show up at his highly advertised meeting? We know why.  Everyone has by now seen with their own eyes that Ed Boks talks a big lie and blogs out his ass, yet does nothing tangible or proactive to save the lives of animals.  

    WHY is the killing of adoptable and treatable animals up so high under Ed Boks? The kill rate is up 31%, and Antonio Villaraigosa still can't figure out why people are so angry?? We know the answer to this too. Ed Boks specializes in smoke and mirrors, but is altogether incompetent to do anything concrete to help the very department he has unfortunately been allowed to run. 

     WHY are impounds increasing under Ed Boks?  Ed Boks blames foreclosures, but that is just his latest excuse.  Foreclosures in other cities are not producing huge increases in impounds and in Los Angeles the foreclosed homes get sold right away to someone who can move in with pets. The main LAAS impound increase is kittens, which have nothing to do with foreclosures but do have to do with Ed Boks not offering enough spay/neuter. He has not increased spay/neuter to the public at all, even though the city now requires spay/neuter by law. 

Boks has the six spay/neuter clinics we all wasted our tax dollars on, but hey still sit unused. An average of more than a full year the city's spay/neuter clinics have sat unused, times six clinics!  That means ED BOKS HAS WASTED SIX YEARS OF SPAY/NEUTER! Is it any wonder impounds and killing are both up under Ed Boks? 

Ed Boks is the modern day snake oil salesman, going from one city to the next trying to sell his "easy cure-all" to naive animal lovers based on a recipe of nothing but empty rhetoric. It appears that every legitimate humane organization in the Nation knows that Boks is a imposter. No decent or progressive shelter system would have hired Boks after his botched-up jobs in Maricopa and NYC. But Los Angeles, with a Mayor who was busy having affairs and fantasizing of being President some day simply allowed this faker to come into our city and run roughshod over the humane community and the poor animals who have no voice.  

If not YOU, then WHO?

If not NOW, then WHEN?

Fire Ed Boks NOW!