The Guss Report — Government officials, including mayors of Los Angeles, hate firing executives they hired. It shows they exercised poor judgement and that their staffers were unable to run interference to protect the insular City Hall culture.
That was especially true when it came to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his 2005 hiring of Ed Boks to run L.A. Animal Services. Three and a half years later, Mr. Boks “resigned” with a superficial glowing letter of appreciation from Mr. Villaraigosa. He signed it just prior to the city settling a $130,000 sexual harassment lawsuit leveled against the city and Mr. Boks. This was the real final straw of Mr. Boks’s tumultuous tenure here. True to form, the LA Times’ glossed over that in its 2009 Boks autopsy.
Mr. Boks has resigned, “effective immediately,” from his most recent gig running the tiny Yavapai Humane Society in Prescott, AZ.
This was an enormous fall in prestige, visibility and income from his days in L.A. and, prior to that, New York City.
Mr. Boks lost his brief pre-Los Angeles job running New York City Animal Care and Control due in large part to a racial discrimination suit and a tenure described by New York magazine in truthful and less than glowing terms.
Another Downside
“So what happened? Animal workers unanimously point to former Animal Care and Control director Ed Boks, who served from 2003 to 2005: One alliance member sniped, “Boks’s programs had catchy names, but they had no substance and weren’t sustainable.”
That is how Laura Beth Heisen, a former Los Angeles Animal Services Commissioner, Chair of the city’s Spay/Neuter Committee, MBA and prosecutor remembers Mr. Boks’s time in L.A.
“At his first Commission meeting after just two weeks as General Manager, he announced that euthanasia was down by 25%. After two weeks when nothing of any substance had changed? I knew at that moment that it would be all about hype.”
Just as Mr. Villaraigosa kicked Mr. Boks to the curb, voluntarily or otherwise, in 2009, his media flack and prospective City Councilmember Matt Szabo falsely told the public:
“Under (Mr. Boks’s) leadership, this city has revamped the way we treat and care for our pets and animals. The ‘no kill’ policy has become a central component of our animal services strategy. Pet adoptions are up and shelters have expanded at a rapid rate. And ‘spay and neuter’ has become more than just a call to action. It is the law in Los Angeles.”
As I showed in my recent CityWatch essay, seven years later, despite claims by Mayor Garcetti, “No Kill is a joke in L.A.,” as is the porous spay/neuter law and the false claim that “adoptions are up.”
In an upcoming CityWatch essay, I will show, with Ms. Heisen’s help, how Mr. Garcetti’s minions knowingly falsified 8,807 pet adoptions when those animals were merely moved from cages in one city-owned building to another — with the deceptive help of City Controller Ron Galperin, City Council President Herb Wesson and current Animal Services management and commissioners.
To date, Mr. Garcetti and company do not know where those animals are, whether they are alive. They have yet to give a public explanation about their false adoption claims.
Mr. Guss, MBA, is a contributor to CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Business Journal, Los Angeles magazine and others. He blogs on humane issues at http://ericgarcetti.blogspot.com/
