Staycee Dains spent about a month working on overseeing an animal shelter in Los Angeles when employees openly refused.
Dains asked the staff to clean the kennel. Instead, the employee picked up a hose and sprayed a dog in the face, Dane said.
Daine thought the employee should be fired, but she said the city’s HR department recommended five days of leave.
Mayor Karen Bass hired dains in June 2023 after committing to turn LA into a “national model for animal welfare” by turning around a problematic shelter that dogs might live in overcrowded and dirty doghouses.
However, in an interview with The Times, Dains said he felt helpless to resolve established issues, including severe staff shortages and employees who violated or ignored animals.
She said that the HR department, which functions like the HR department of a private company, has repeatedly told her they cannot fire a problematic employee. She also clashed with one of the unions representing the shelter employees.
At one point, Dains contacted the LA County prosecutors for help.
Meanwhile, as overcrowding worsened, more dogs and cats were euthanized in urban shelters than in previous years.
“We need to tell you the unfiltered, unvarried truth about what’s going on in the shelter,” Daines said.
In August, after more than a year as general manager of Animal Services, Dains took paid leave. A few days later, the top base advisor told Daines that her last day was November 30th and that she could resign freely before that.
Bass spokesman Zach Seidle pushed back Daine’s accusations.
“Many of these traits are misleading, and some are merely inaccurate,” he said in an email.
Dains said in a series of interviews that they did not provide sufficient funding to meet the basic needs of the animals in the six shelters.
During the first year of the bus, the mayor provided an 18% budget increase, as times and others critically reported on the conditions of the shelter. The following fiscal year, her budget proposals slightly reduced funding for the department.
Last week, the city council escaped animal services from major cuts when it passed a budget that closed a roughly $1 billion shortfall.
Daines, who previously worked at top shelters in San Jose and Long Beach, said her employees were bleached into the suffering of animals after witnessing them daily. The staffing shortage was so bad that the three of them were responsible for the three dogs: cleaning the kennel, setting up the adoption, and working with the medical team.
“The only thing that animals were suffering was that they couldn’t sleep knowing they were suffering,” said Daines, who now works at the shelter system in Sacramento. “It was terrible.”
Dains, who earned around $273,000 a year in LA, said he saw some of his employees pound the dog or spray it with water to “fear” it. She told employees to stop behaviour, but some said they were trained to treat dogs like that, she said.
To ensure that the animals are fed and the enclosures are cleaned, Daine suggested that they start a schedule that will be tracked when each task is performed. But union representatives are worried that the information could be used to punish employees, Dains said.
Ultimately, Daines said she dropped the proposal because of opposition from the union.
Daine said the personal entanglement and gossip among employees made it difficult to hold them accountable.
Some supervisors had sexual relationships with their subordinates, which led them to overlook a decline in employee work performance, according to Dains. Others used the “stains” they had to protest their colleagues when they were faced with their actions, she said.
Dains said they suspected that some employees were sleeping during the night shift, rather than cleaning cages or doing paperwork. She showed time a photo of a dog bed placed on the floor of the staff room, like a “nest.”
She also said she saw the employee watching video on her cell phone, not at work. Others ignored people who stepped into shelters trying to adopt their pets, she said. Some employees told her that their colleagues had failed to feed cats and dogs food and water.
At the same time, other employees said they went “continuously more than ever” to compensate for those who didn’t pull their weight.
“There’s a fair portion of the staff who aren’t doing their jobs,” she said. “I’ve always seen this.”
Daine held the supervisor responsible for “not asking them to perform.”
She said she faced a pushback when she tried to discipline her supervisor.
After she placed her supervisors accused of bullying people on leave, the North American International Union 300 of workers filed a complaint against her, Daine said.
A human resources spokesman declined to comment.
At the same time, Dains admitted that it was supposed to be tougher for some of the assistant general managers who reported directly to her. However, she said she wanted to maintain a working relationship with them.
“It’s difficult to do to start writing the executive-level manager you’re going to work with,” she said.
An employee at the shelter who requested anonymity because they had no permission to speak to the media agreed to Dains’ assessment.
“There’s no accountability and no impact,” he said. “And the staff who do the work have to work twice as hard as they can.”
Last year, a report by Best Friends Animal Society highlighted the poor situation at shelters, suggesting possible solutions, and criticised Dain as the “biggest barrier” to improvement.
Shelters do not have written protocols and without communication about changes that “were changed five times last year” to euthanasia policy;
According to Times analysis, the number of dogs euthanized at City Shelter between January and September last year increased by 72% compared to the same period last year. The number of dogs entering the shelter has increased every year since 2022, but the number of deaths has far surpassed the population growth.
In the crowded state, the animals began to behave poorly and suffered from “mental and emotional breakdowns.” This made them less likely to be hired and more likely to be euthanized.
In an interview with The Times, Dains defended her euthanasia decision, claiming it was not safe for animals, staff, volunteers, or the public to “walk” dogs in their kennels for months or years.
She said there was no euthanasia policy when she arrived, and the department had created it during her tenure.
Bass was the boss of Dains, but Dains’ main contact was Jacqueline Hamilton, the vice mayor of the neighborhood services. Daines said she spoke with Hamilton frequently, talking about HR and other issues. But Hamilton doesn’t provide meaningful help and doesn’t want her to publicize her poor situation at the shelter, Dains said.
“I don’t get any movement or traction,” Daines told The Times, explaining her work experience.
Saidl, a spokesman for Bass, said Dains was “gived support for success, including helping to communicate department status to the public and decision makers.”
Dains said she asked Deputy Dist shortly after she became general manager. Atty. Kimberly Aborez, who worked on the animal cruelty case, wrote to the mayor about the poor situation at the shelter.
Venusse D. Dunn, a spokesman for the District Attorney’s Office, said Abourezk did not send a letter as he visited the city’s animal shelter and found no evidence of the crime.
The office is “not in a position to communicate to another agency how the facility is run,” Dan said.
Longtime animal services staff member Annette Ramirez is currently interim general manager. As the department explained in this month’s news release, the “severe overcrowding crisis” continues.
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