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Mayor/Council Approve 60 Day Dog/Cat License Amnesty To Geneerate Gen'l Fund ("Blank Check") Revenue, Not Necessarily Improve LB Animal Care ServicesSomeone deliberately included the item on Council's "consent calendar" to avoid separate discussion unless a Councilmember(s) requested it...and none did.

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(November 11, 2018) -- Someone buried it among items on the Oct. 23 City Council "consent calendar" on which there's no Council discussion unless a Council member(s) requests it...and no Councilmember(s) did.

As a result, the City Council voted 8-0 (Andrews absent) without saying a word to approve a November 1-Dec 31, 2018 amnesty waiving late penalities for pet licenses.

No Councilmember asked to receive a report after the 60 day amnesty period showing how much licensing revenue was collected.

No Councilmember indicated they'd agendize an item, after the revenue amount is known, to vote on whether to allocate the amnesty revenue to Animal Care Services or let management spend it elsewhere.

By saying nothing on the Oct.23 item, Councilmembers ensured that whatever amnesty revenue City Hall collects will be quietly dumped into LB's General Fund where it can be spent as management proposes and a Council majority disposes.

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Management's agendizing memo said:

ACS will announce the Program through a citywide marketing campaign along with a direct letter mailing campaign to potentially affected pet owners. The goal will be to get as many pet owners as possible in compliance with the pet licensing laws and keep them current in future years, potentially resulting in an increase of ongoing revenue for new licenses and renewals in the current and future years.

We're curious to see if the "marketing campaign" will include pictures of little doggies and kitties, implying the licensing revenue will help save their lives when there's no absolutely no legal assurance at this point that the amnesty revenue will be used for that purpose.

The City Auditor's recent Animal Care Services "performance audit" included a recommendation for an animal license amnesty, but that didn't break new ground. Management's agendizing memo acknowledges animal license amnesties in 2010 and 2016 were "extremely successful in renewing previously expired licenses."

In our opinion, Mayor Garcia's hand-picked "Animal Care Visioning Task Force" -- from which he refused to appoint even one member in the leadership of No Kill LongBeach -- showed the city that his group likely won't recommend doing what the Mayor doesn't want done. No Kill advocates could test this at the Nov. 13 "task Force" meeting by urging a Task Force member to make a motion (hopefully backed by a second) to recommend that (a) city management publicly disclose the amount of amnesty revenue collected by no later than Jan 15, 2019 and (b) that management or a Council member(s) agendize an item no later than Feb. 15 for voted action on where to allocate that amnesty collected sum.

(We see no Brown Act hurdle preventing such a motion since the City Attorney has previously noted that the Task Force can needn't comply with Brown Act requirements because it was created by the Mayor, not by a Council-voted action.)

Task Force members' reaction(s) to such a motion would be revealing.

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