The commissioners believe a visit to the shelter prepped by errant managers tells them all they need to know about operations deserving a new building. One is needed. The public and animals do. The managers don’t deserve one. They need a new attitude. There is no “creative use of space.” And one guided visit to impress commissioners does not create “expertise.”
How shocking that the county hears none of citizens stories affected by MCAS, don’t pay attention to data, citizens reports, and public records, do not pay attention to long term volunteer concerns, and don’t realize that funding has been redirected from pet retention and redemption to sales of unneutered and unspayed animals for $25 dollars to anyone and the kill rate is escalating. All of that will be transferred to a new building when what is needed first is new management.
I have never read a more shallow opinion about MCAS’ “creative” use of limited space made by the respondents who believe a one time guided visit creates expertise. It’s like saying “I went to a seminar once about doctors so now I’m a doctor!” MCAS has no creative use of space except killing when under past administrations they did have multiple outreaches and made a greater effort to care for and place animals they now kill as “unhealthy and untreatable” to get rid of them when by any objective standard they are not. It is called lying. This article about the managers “suffering” in an old building would be best titled “The art of the con.”
Over 80% of the MCAS demographic, over represented by low income working people, homeless and minorities live in Portland. Transportation by MAX and bus ends several miles away and MCAS has unfriendly policies and working hours to the public making redemption difficult. So why would you build a palace in Troutdale instead of purchasing a building in Portland?
Once again the County Board of Commissioners have made clear they don’t care about their constituents at all. They are there to parrot and protect managers only. They don’t hear nor do they solicit the public voices of those whose animals end up at MCAS. The tune out workers. Interview those who have left traumatized by working in an inhumane authoritarian environment.
A new easily accessed building for the public is needed. But most of all what is needed is a county commission that cares and a working shelter. We order and read about 2000 pages of MCAS public records weekly. I have personally read these records for 25 years. What is happening internally now is shocking. The county commissioners should read them too instead of abandoning those most affected by MCAS while protecting their own. Grahek herself fails to reach standards set by national animal shelter guidelines. She had no experience whatsoever in animal sheltering before assuming the directorship after failing to advance at the Department of Aging and Disabilities. She was nominated anyway. That is the definition of the art of the con.
Gail O’Connell-Babcock, PhDCitizens for Humane Animal Legislation/Watchdog
“…it is also important to note that the shelter environment can also be difficult for some. Volunteers are expected to be able to mentally and emotionally process the reality of serving in the shelter environment and we ask that you make an informed decision about your ability to volunteer with us.”
MCAS managers show that they assume that all shelters are run as authoritarian organizations and that killing animals is an inevitable part of shelter reality when they claim they are just like any other shelter. That view means that volunteers must adapt, leave voluntarily, or be fired… if they care about animals. Freedom of speech is forbidden.
It is false that all shelters are authoritarian and must be run on discarded “control” models. That was not the choice of the community. It is one imposed by sitting managers. When MCAS had a higher save rate, anyone—volunteers, rescues, staff, and ordinary citizens—could offer and also help seek resources for dogs at risk. They were not told to ‘know their place.’ That is why there was a higher rate of participation and saved lives. Animals with special needs received training addressing their needs, not death sentences.
It is MCAS’ management that is at fault. And it is their decision to run an agency as an authoritarian organization against county standards.
MCAS has 46 volunteers listed for October who routinely walk dogs. It is not enough. That number is consistently very low. Volunteers are critical to MCAS. They primarily address the welfare needs of dogs at the agency. Because volunteer numbers are so low, MCAS is currently failing all minimum mental health standards for dogs.
The Guidelines for Standards of Care in Animal Shelters Journal of Shelter Medicine and Community Animal Health 2022
The effect is not ‘change and correction’ but to kill more animals and tell the community to accept that is inevitable. Most animals become distressed at MCAS and MCAS only treatment plan is to kill dogs who are the victims of the agency’s toxic environment, not correct the environment, not welcome volunteer active participation, and not help animals thrive. It is about smothering compassion. Volunteers are advised to get used to it or they can leave.
The entire volunteer manual is about authoritarian control. It reflects a failed agency culture under current management. Unless that is changed the agency will not thrive and more importantly, the workers, volunteers, animals and community will bear the consequences of that failure.
Gail O’Connell-Babcock
The Guidelines for Standards of Care in Animal Shelters, Journal of Shelter Medicine and Community Animal Health 2022
The February 2023 investigative report by OPB April Ehrlich, addressing MCAS’ failures could be published today. A year and a half later there has been no substantive change.
“In a 2018 report, auditors noted that multiple staff were concerned the shelter had adopted out unsafe dogs.”
MCAS does not adopt out “unsafe dogs.”They adopt dogs out unsafely because of bad policies that disregard animal welfare, including low standards and $25 adoptions, when ‘cheap’ is an invitation to impulse buys. Markdowns are intended as incentives. When ‘discount specials’ never end, save changing their name, that speaks to the agency’s failure and the corruption of its values.
Adoptions: How adoptions go wrong.
Over the protests of staff and volunteers, Jasmin, a wonderful dog whose history included a severe attack by another dog, was to have an adoption restriction requiring that she be the only dog in the prospective family. Instead, management overrode that restriction and adopted Jasmin to a family with another resident dog. Days later she was returned by the family after a dog attack. MCAS managers killed her for their careless indifference. The practice of facilitating poor adoptions and killing dogs who have been sent to unsafe homes and returned happens all of the time.
Playgroups: What was intended to relieve the stress of constant confinement after working with Dogs Playing for Life, has been repurposed into an evaluation about adoptability based upon ‘observed’ social skills in the play group, filtering out dogs that, in their assessment, can’t be adopted and so should be euthanized.
This test is deeply flawed because of the debilitatingly stressful environment fostered by this shelter’s management policies. Dogs known to be reactive to other dogs are included in playgroup tests, often muzzled, increasing their anxiety and fear. Playgroups include dogs in heat, injured dogs, dogs suffering kennel cough, disabled, blind, and deaf dogs, diagnostic categories whose illness or vulnerabilities place them at risk.
Intake: Dogs are rushed through intake regardless of their levels of distress, a process forced by the management’s edict for speed efficiency. If distressed, they are attached by leash to an i-hook, escalating fear and anxiety by trapping them, and then the intrusive exams proceed. They are then labeled with ‘handling sensitivity’ and/or ‘fear’ or ‘jumpy/mouthy’ waivers for defensive reactions brought about by insensitive handling. For example, if they “head whip” when intrusive exams are conducted. When staff behaves insensitively, on the orders of management, the dogs are blamed for their reactions. Everything becomes the dog’s fault.
Data Collection: “Data collections” are visits to kenneled dogs, usually but not always up to 3, to evaluate how many personal space intrusions, including checking teeth, ears, and physically checking spay/neuter status, a dog will tolerate from a complete stranger in a shelter environment. Staff are not trained about animal behavior, how to recognize stress and how to gain safe compliance for physical exams. The emphasis is always on speed. Pushing dogs down or pursuing them to leash is unsafe conduct. The only tools management provides are negative: The word “No”; Pet Corrector, spray bottles and shake cans all of which can backfire by escalating stress.
Fosters: Are not screened, except to make sure their companion animals are licensed, and chosen randomly. They receive no training and are not provided behavior training resources. The absence of professional guidance creates safety risks. If an incident occurs it is again the dog’s fault according to managers, not their own poor policies.
Adoption Returns: Adoption Returns are commonplace because of poor and indifferent adoption standards. Only the dog pays the price.
“Multnomah County shelter has a policy to offer emergency boarding services for up to a month.”
Director Erin Grahek and Operations Manager Marian Cannell ended emergency board and respite fosters a while ago without announcement, excusing this with the statement that they have insufficient space. ‘Space’ is a matter of creativity. Respite fostering and emergency board have been replaced by the ‘ 6 day hold mandatory’ for owned animals, after which MCAS assumes ownership.
Redemption and retention are their funded missions. When one lacks the skills to honor it, one does not just get rid of the mission. MCAS accommodated for respite and emergency board in the past despite an equal or greater intake, smaller budget and fewer managers. What did previous directors do differently when space was available? The funding is there. The imagination, will, initiative, and values are not.
Attached is a proposed respite foster program County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson placed on a short list over a year ago. Why hasn’t it been funded? Other space limitations are the result of multiple adoption returns, as many as 6 times in one case.
Owner surrenders outside the scope of those that the county is mandated to take are often about owners’ deficits and mismanagement. Issues that could be managed by providing counseling before accepting a surrender, as former Multnomah County Animal Control Director Hank Miggins once required.
There is no veterinary social work position to proactively help people keep their animals when a crisis occurs. Frequent adoption returns and high intake from owner surrenders are challenges that should be met with policy change, but the management instead chooses to prioritize speedy intake with speedy adoption to create space.
“‘I will bring on strong professionals who have the animal welfare background that I don’t, and marry that with my experience as a manager and a leader in Multnomah County,’ Erin Grahek said.”
That program has failed completely. First, a leader must know the difference between competent effective sheltering and poor sheltering. A distinction that is not learned from following the managers’ lead. It has to come from a director’s lived professional experience or they will not be able to lead, and instead be relegated to a director in title only. Operations manager, Marian Cannell hired in November 2022, and the supervisory managers demonstrably lack the skills and background necessary to run a humane progressive animal shelter that meets this community’s needs. Management positions have been filled based not upon skills proficiency and a broad-based search, but upon personal loyalty to existing management.
The community and homeless animals bear the costs of government failure. The February 2023 report from OPB April Erhlich could just as well be today’s report.
Service to managers is more important than serving the community, what is really needed to return service to the community is a system of accountability.
Gail O’Connell-Babcock
Jason Renaud’s Respite Program proposal from September 2022
Operations Manager Marian Cannell, the current defacto MCAS director, came on board the Titanic in November 2022. Since then, a significant escalation of dogs held indefinitely in legal custody has occurred at MCAS. For example, September 29’s intake records show 25 out of 50 dogs were there on an indefinite protective custody legal hold (record attached). Dogs on protective custody legal hold are subject to the shelter’s notoriouslypoor animal care. It is as though the dogs are being punished for the alleged misdeeds of their owners.
The dogs held indefinitely on protective custody legal hold represent a dramatic escalation. The rationale behind why they are being held is worth asking. The reasons they are being held cannot be reviewed since these are legal cases and the records, including the animal care records, are redacted until the case is closed. In two recently released cases where the records have been released (attached below) the dogs were the victims. MCAS killed both once the legal cases were resolved, lending ironic meaning to the term “protective custody.”
Managers will tell anyone who asks that they are holding the dogs in custody for the city and county but it is MCAS that seeks and filing the charges most of the time. It seems a zealous focus on enforcement over sheltering, without any clarity about why so many more dogs are on legal hold, lending to the perception that the agency has been repurposed as a dog prison. Like a prison, the shelter suffers from over capacity issues because so many become long term residents, but unlike a prison, dogs don’t have the rights to not be killed for space because the prison needs “room.”
Marian Cannell, with Director Erin Grahek’s full cooperation, has redirected the agency’s mission away from its funded intention of prevention, education, and service to one of treating animals not as companions whose lives deserve respect but as potential pests, nuisances and liabilities best killed.
The kill rate for dogs judged “unadoptable,” for reasons that are not professionally justifiable, has escalated dramatically. For example, a distressed dog who snapped when a muzzle was forced on him and also when a loop leash was swung over his head, was judged “unsafe,” unhealthy, and untreatable, then killed. He was not. There were solutions short of killing him for signs of agency stress.
No one in government has meaningfully addressed the regression that fails to meet the needs of this community, let alone national standards for animal care. There are less draconian solutions than impoundment, followed by execution, for dogs placed on protective custody legal hold. The shelter is uninterested in alternatives and has not explained why there has been such a dramatic increase in enforcement cases and custody holds. Is it a need or just a matter of preference?
Two records, formerly protective legal custody holds. Redactions have been applied to protect the identities of private persons and non-managerial staff.
Once again, Multnomah County Animal Services denied the auditor’s conclusions. And once again, the County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson and the Board of Commissioners attempted to push aside the reported misuse of funds, and announced no need for investigation, despite the fact that the shelter failed to implement more than 50 previous recommendations needed to improve conditions for shelter cats and dogs up to national standards.
The county’s response to the Auditor’s report over the misuse of funds brings George Orwell to mind:
“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proven wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.” George Orwell (1946)
The County Chair and Board of Commissioners have also abandoned MCAS’ lofty funded mission announced first in for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 budget then repeated for the FY 2025 budget, a nod to aspirational goals that never do come true:
“Historically, the primary role of MCAS has been animal control enforcement and stray animal sheltering. In harmony with County equity goals and the MCAS North Star of providing quality care for animals and equitable services for the community, MCAS is shifting resources toward supporting pet owners to care for and retain their animals. The aim is to prevent animals from needing shelter due to surrender or abandonment, and to intervene prior to the need for enforcement activity.” — Community Services FY 2024, 2025Adopted Budget,
The problem is Multnomah County government’s willingness to squirm around facts to protect its fading image and lost goals: Will this lipstick on a pig (apologies to the pigs) do or should I pick another shade? After tampering with the facts, nothing changes and there is more and more to hide.
The Spay/Neuter Fund
The spay/neuter monies donated by the public intended to help low income families pay for spay/neuter surgeries have been diverted to general adoptions instead of their intended purpose. That is cheating. MCAS had community service clinics where low cost surgeries were performed as the fund was intended. They also had a mobile spay/neuter van donated by Petco, that never left MCAS.
The intention of the donated public funds was public service to help low income populations. The only argument that can be given is that their policy for Spay/neuter donations state that the funds “may” be used as the program describes. This has little meaning, as the policy for Dolly’s Fund states how it “will” be used, but they misuse it all the same. The agency has historically reached into donors’ pockets without their knowledge, using the funds for expediency.
The power of double speak.
The glib way the county explained the diversion of spay neuter funds for low income families to support their general adoptions voucher system is embarrassing. They can’t help themselves.
“This program makes vouchers available for all adopters who need financial support, which especially helps low-income families in need, Serena Cruz, the county’s chief operating officer, wrote in a memo.”
Serena Cruz’s response is misleading. The vouchers aren’t going to low income families. They are going to everyone who adopts a $25 dog, the cost for dogs on an endless ‘special sale.’ It is also a disclaimer of the county government’s responsibility to spay and neuter all animals before they leave MCAS. They can. MCAS once spayed and neutered all animals—cats and dogs—before they left the agency when they had a lower budget, fewer managers, and a significantly higher intake. This shift in policy began as a temporary measure that then turned into the permanent practice we see today.
MCAS also did not honor Oregonlive Reporter Austin De Dios request for figures on voucher redemption despite the fact that these figures are readily available. Why withhold this?
The real reason MCAS wants animals out as quickly as possible is their rejection of their funded service mission replacing the public’s mission with a pet store model: ‘Four on the floor; out the door.’ To expedite a speedy exit, animals go out cheaply and unaltered (“Adopters Welcome!”) and are often just as quickly returned, un-altered and harmed by the experience of thoughtless adoptions. Some are killed as a result of MCAS negligent adoption practices. There is no net gain, just a revolving door, when adopted animals are returned after their adoptions have been driven by speed and low/no standards. Speedy isn’t the answer when they are returned unaltered, after a soiree into the community.
The ‘get them out of here fast anyway you can’ plan isn’t working because its not thoughtful, service oriented, and doesn’t lower intake when so many are returned, often in worse shape than when they left, or dead.
“Staffing shortages,” “budget constraints,” and “increasing veterinary costs,” the factors MCAS lists as responsible for the necessity of adoption of the voucher system have nothing to do with why MCAS has adopted a voucher system. That is just another sorry excuse and lying by misdirection: ‘Look here, not there.’ MCAS is fully staffed and has been for awhile; has more managers than ever and every year is granted a larger and larger budget despite taking in fewer animals; cats are left out in the cold.
They changed the mission to what is easiest for them: Cheap sales. The short wait for an animal to be spayed or neutered before leaving is an obstacle to rapid fire adoptions, so they abandoned the funded mission that includes reducing overpopulation by constraining breeding, and replaced it with what works for them: Sales and give aways that can serve as opportunities for breeders. There are off record reports of exactly that happening.
There are no budget constraints. The budget is unconstrained and increasing year after year without any improvement in performance. MCAS budget for the fiscal year 2025 is $15.684,365. MCAS continues to fund failure year after year at a higher and higher cost to the public.
The diversion of Adoption Outreach monies to fund salaries
It is just a continuation of pick pocketing and dishonoring government obligations. Outreach at diverse physical locations has been proven critical to increasing adoptions. Most adoptions once took place at outreach events. There are almost no outreach events now. But outreach works. MCAS Operations manager Marian Cannell has sponsored only two events—one at the Oregon Rail Heritage Center on August 19, 2023 and another at Theresa’s County Feed and Pet Store on June 15, 2024—during her several years of tenure. She did this while calling out ‘Red Alert’ alarms to the media and the public to adopt because MCAS is “at capacity,” implying more animals will be killed due to a lack of space.
The outreach events fund is flush with donations and not being actively used, so why not borrow it for another purpose, distinct from its intended use? This seems to be Serena Cruz’s rationalization. However, robbing one account,a restricted account of earmarked funds,to pay for the salary of the program communications coordinator is dishonest theft. The assertion that the program coordinator is critical in “managing outreach efforts,” when there have been only two outreach events in two years, is a bridge too far.
The county did it because it was easy. They’ve never faced consequences for taking from restricted funds. Outreach events are what lead to increased adoptions. The coordinator’s salary siphons from the money intended to subsidize these events. When animals get out of the dismal surroundings of the agency they are adopted.
Dolly’s Fund for the special medical needs of indigent shelter animals
Very little of Dolly’s Fund donations are being spent to cover the medical needs of vulnerable animals at MCAS, the explicit, legally binding, designation for how those funds are to be used. Instead of medical care and medical fosters to care for vulnerable animals, most are expediently killed, especially if a less well funded rescue won’t take them off MCAS’ roster.
These abuses are well documented in MCAS public records animal status reports. Under former Director Michael Oswald, Dolly’s Fund did go to the care of individual animals, instead of being misused as it is now. Animals are now killed with the disclaimer: “We don’t have the resources,” when they do have the resources but lack the will and initiative.
MCAS managers have rejected all of the programs that work to reduce shelter crowding and shelter over population: Outreach events, pet redemption and retention efforts, compassionate emergency board for persons in crisis, and owner surrender counseling. Why try when failure is successfully excused and any excuse will do? Multnomah government’s culture is ‘this work does not matter.” The work incentives are pay, benefits and vacations, not service.
County citizens and the county’s homeless animals deserve better. They deserve a government that works. The role of county government should be to protect public services not public servants and failure. Failure will continue to predictably cascade until the culture of this government changes. It is not just about financial malfeasance. It is about professional malfeasance as well. Homeless animals are marked “Unhealthy and Untreatable” when they are not, as an act of convenience to justify killing them while taking no responsibility. Change and recovery can only begin by removing the current indifferent and opportunistic management at MCAS, a society where a culture of cruelty prevails.
Gail O’Connell-Babcock
Public Records: Jamie Waltz to County Chair Deborah Kafoury and Serena Cruz “Temporary” suspension of spaying/neutering animals before adoption
