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ADL issued another email recently and claimed LAAS was not implementing suggestions they made three years ago. LA animal Friends has rebutted several of the ADL allegations that many of their proposed programs were not in place or in the process.
I don’t think ADL has looked at the LAAS website. There are monthly General manager reports that are filled with statistics, budget expenditures, reports of the number of complaints received, new programs, progress or lack of it on old programs. There is so much information in each report—an average of 25 pages or so—that it is difficult to know which Winograd proposal LAAS has or has not implemented.
If ADL would give me, or publish concisely, Winograd’s top 25 or so suggestions as well as the reasoning behind them, I’d be glad to publish them and go through the General Manager reports, or ask Mr. Boks myself, what has or has not been implemented or will be implemented.
However, just a top-of-the-head look at the ADL email, the info on the LAAS site, as well as talking to Commissioners, and knowing how Boks works, as well as the bureaucratic mess at City Hall, most or all of the ideas have been at least discussed by LAAS and/or the commission and I'm sure the best of them will be implemented when the ability to do so is there. One commissioner has told me that the commission had discussed and passed most of the suggestions made by Winograd long before Boks became GM, but Stuckey failed to implement them.
I would predict that the capacity to implement stuff will begin to increase relatively soon.
One needs to consider that anyone can have good ideas, but they all have to hang togther in a coherent whole. One can say fix that piece, add that piece, but given the budget and personnel constraints, those fixes may not be time and money well spent compared with improvements within the context of an overall plan integrating budget, resources and goals.
ADL proposing 10 or 15 suggestions, each of which would eat time and money, would be similar to me making recommendations on how to fight the war in Iraq. That is, the troops should get better helmets. Well, yeh, but do you then buy fewer night googles, fewer bulletproof vests, or cut munitions used in training? Which tradeoffs will kill fewer soldiers?
All the complex elements of fighting a war exist in running any large department. There are tradeoffs; outsiders, such as ADL or Winograd, who are not intimately aware of the capabilities and resources available, are merely farting in the wind.
There is also something inherently dysfunctional in ADL’s assertion that Boks "only chooses those he can control." Think about it for a minute; what employer or manager who actually wants to get work done deliberately chooses employees he or she don't think will be team players, or who they think will be uncontrollable? From my brief association with the ADL, I became quickly aware that ADL was Pam and Pam’s will prevailed. People who disagree with her disappear from her public and private email lists.
The notion that Boks won't hire someone more knowledgeable than himself is silly. His first new AGM knows a lot more about how the City works than he does, and is an expert in technology and budgeting, and that's exactly why he hired her. He understands his weakness and sought to complement it with someone who could cover that side of things. I predict that his choice for the other AGM will ultimately also complement his skillset and strengths and weaknesses in the same kind of way.
