There is extensive evidence of corruption, wrongdoing, and severe animal abuse and neglect at LA Animal Services. General Manager Brenda Barnette is aware of the problems and refuses to do anything about them. Quality of animal care is very poor at the North Central shelter location and Ms. Barnette refuses to transfer more workers or managers from the shelters that are not in bad shape. 

Ms. Barnette is a former breeder, and former AKC spokesperson against spay and neuter legislation. During her time as LAAS General Manager, she has made many bad decisions including putting all 6 shelter captains on PAID leave, at a cost of $459,000 to the city, when she mistakenly thought they had violated a small rule, by ordering a pizza with petty cash money they received from vending machine contracts. She then also removed the vending machines completely for a while, leaving hard working volunteers with nowhere to purchase drinks.

Wendy Gruel's audit results of LAAS showed extensive missing money and extensive potential revenue of over a million dollars overlooked.

She wanted to move the small skeleton crew of graveyard shift workers to day shifts, and leave thousands of animals completely unattended for overnight. The minimal cost savings of moving a few workers from night to day shift would have been offset by her plan to hire security guards and post one outside of each shelter. The city council PAWS Committee had to step in and stop her. 

She moved the Rescue Liasons, and the Volunteer Coordinators to regular kennel duty, at very little cost savings, practically eliminating the recruitment of the volunteer staff, and making it harder for rescue charities to save animals. Over time seems to have realized that it was a bad decision, and has put some of them back on their original duties.

She violates the right to free speech of shelter volunteers by terminating them if they speak negatively about the shelter, or even just politely suggest ideas for change to their supervisors, or if they witness wrongdoing and she is afraid that they might wind up being a whistleblower.

She violates the right to free speech of animal rescue charities by revoking their pull rights if they speak negatively about the shelter, suggest ideas for change, or network animals that the shelter has neglected medically.

During her first year as GM, the kill rates shot up. Later, when kill rates went down, it was not because of any efforts by Ms. Barnette herself or LAAS, but because of a different large animal charity who opened a Los Angeles location and started rescuing animals from LAAS.

Ms. Barnette is highly unprofessional, and when members of the public politely ask her to address or correct specific problems at LAAS, she ignored them repeatedly, and then eventually responds with personal attacks, rather then addressing the issue at hand.

Ms. Barnette took the guns away from the animal control officers, which lead to wild animals like deer not being able to be euthanized and suffering many hours before dying.

She has repeatedly refused to confiscate animals from hoarding cases, such as a rabbit breeding operation, and convicted animal hoarder Cynthia Grudger, leading to many having died agonizing deaths.

Barnette has lost out on hundreds of thousands of available dollars for spaying and neutering grants that she did not use, and she forfeited, including an additional one million dollar grant from the Heigl Foundation.

The North Central Shelter location has some outside dog cages with improper shelter.  Supervisors are often transferred between shelters, and many have failed to bring the short haired, small, sick dogs indoors, even during the winter, and have left them in the outside perimeter cages 24/7, all night long, all winter long, even in the rain. There are no doghouses available in these cages and the tiny amount of luke-warm heating that takes the sting out of the cold cement floors, often breaks, and animals have died of hypothermia in those cages.

Improper feeding is common at North Central, and many large breed dogs are fed less then 1/2 a cup of kibble a day, while many small dogs are too afraid to compete for food with the other dogs in their cages. Animals often leave North Central emaciated, even if they arrived in adequate body weight. Water bowls are routinely green with mold and algae.

The veterinary staff at North Central fails to notice all of the sick dogs, and many are not under treatment. Animals in labor are not kept in the medical rooms, and premie kittens have even fallen through the bars of upper cages in the cat room.

The inner portions of the outside dog runs are almost never cleaned, not even in between animals-as they are only cleaned when a known disease was present. Feces is many inches high in most of those areas. It is not visible to the public.

Workers often discourage people from adopting, and will sit or stand around gossiping instead of doing animal care. Incorrect information is often given out to the public. Comfort items such as blankets are rarely given out. 
 
Workers are not calling rescue groups early enough to alert them of bottle babies that need to be picked up the same day or will be killed (because the shelter doesn't have enough staff to feed them). When they have mild standard Upper Respiratory Infections they are being denied entrance into the foster care program.

Dogs are still being euthanized even when there are 20-30 large open runs.

We are calling upon Mayor Garcetti to hire a new General Manager who encourages people to bring forward ideas for improvements, instead of punishes them. We are calling for a General Manager who will manage the shelters and make sure that animals are being given proper food, water, shelter, and medical care at North Central.