The New AGM job posts and the ADL offensive

I feel the like Godfather. Every time I think I’ve gotten out, they pull me back again.

Just as I thought the ADLLA was trending towards some degree of professionalism, they do something incredibly self-defeating.

Yesterday LAAS posted that two AGM positions were open as well as the qualifications necessary. Within hours the ADLLA posted a full-scale attack on Boks, Bickhart and the entire LAAS Commission, undoubtedly winning overwhelming support for their cause among those Commissioners.

If we look at the AGM requirements, they are a lot like one would expect. They require the AGM of operations to actually have four years shelter operations experience. Isn’t this a surprise? Mr. Boks wants someone who actually has experience running shelters to take over for him when he is not around? How archaic. He is not willing to bring in fresh faces with absolutely no experience to train them on the job. Darn; I had hoped to apply for this position myself as I have no shelter experience either. Of course, I am not as brilliant as ADLLA’s female candidates are touted to be, nor am I sure of which cronies they are talking about.

Now the other position, the administrative position, requires someone with two years of large organization administration experience. Again, how quaint is Ed’s thinking. Experience required! Who would have thought?

Actually, this is quite serious. Being a large organization administrator requires a lot of skills and knowledge to hit the ground running.

I was on the personnel selection committee that interviewed the female candidates in 2003 that ADLLA wants Boks to appoint to those positions. Not one had any shelter experience. Pointedly I asked each one about their large organization management experience. They had none. The one male who did have experience running a large shelter system was not invited. He was not a brilliant female.

So, what did ADLLA do last night? They issued another scathing attack on Ed Boks, Jim Bickhart, and the LAAS Commissioners, more or less promising to dismember them, at least psychologically, unless Ed appointed one of their own candidates.

Their argument was that Ed and Jim are incompetent jerks who require brilliant females to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, and of course, their brilliant females are their brilliant females. There wasn’t even the slightest indication that once one of their people were appointed, that they would let Ed get on with saving animal lives. It appears they would continue to attack both until Ed was fired and Jim run out of town on a rail.

They attacked the Commissioners:

Now, we are left with a bunch of milquetoast Commissioners who don't have the courage to stand up for much of anything and who continue to do the same old, same old that the dozens of previous LAAS Commissioners have done.

So, while the Commissioners continue to talk ad nauseum about everything but the implementation of concrete solutions to the killing going on inside LAAS, most people in the humane community no longer want to waste their time going to these embarrassing meetings -run by a president who should have long ago resigned from the Commission and allowed more decisive and definitive individuals to be appointed. The animals are now left with a weak commission and a fraudulent General Manager and his accomplice Jim Bickhart.

Wasn’t this a brilliant strategy, alienating the entire Commission, Boks and Bickhart? Why didn’t I think of that when I tried to build consensus in the past?

As an argument, they drag out their tired but oft repeated charge that Boks was fired from NYNACC, and get this, "Not one commissioner voted to renew his contract." This charge has been dealt with "ad nauseum" by several bloggers. Ed was already in the negotiation stage of coming to LA. He asked them not to renew. The only evidence that Ed was fired was their own repetition of their charge. Their case is so weak that they never published the newspaper article that talked about his being fired (which actually said the decision was mutual), nor did they follow up and find individuals who supported this charge. Indeed, in my previous post, I quoted Annette Stark:

"At NYCACC, the first shelter worker who answered the phone said, “He was a good boss. He got rid of a lot of managers who were sitting around doing nothing.” CityBeat’s calls to United Service Workers of America, which represents NYCACC shelter employees, were not returned.

She quotes Boks as saying:

“We did have a high turnover rate [in New York City], 60 to 70 percent,” he explains. ”There were a lot of folks in that system that didn’t appreciate or weren’t up to the challenge of no-kill.”
Geez, if I fired 60-70% of my staff, I think there would be a lot of disgruntled ex-employees trying to get me fired. Even if Ed were fired, could it be because he was shaking up staff?

Now, as to other factual content presented in the post, we find:

It is almost the six-month mark for Ed Boks' having been hired as General Manager of LAAS by Mayor Villa La Grossa -and the terrible black cloud that followed Boks from Maricopa to NYC (and now to LA) still hovers above his head. If Jim Bickhart is too busy covering up for Boks' lies, and Ed Boks is too busy doing the cocktail circuit and telling the same lies he told in Maricopa and NYC, ADL-LA must do what's right for the animals and expose this to the Mayor -by going to his doorstep, if we have to.

Ed started work as GM on January 3, 2006. It is now May 8, 2006. I calculate this as four months and five days, about two months short of six months. So the ADLLA cannot subtract two dates and find the difference accurately, at a fifth grade level.

They talk about lies and incompetence of Boks and Bickhart, even while the euthanasia rate is falling by 35-40% each month compared to the previous year and adoptions are increasing.