The Chicago Tribune had a depressing editorial today, “Why lost pets stay lost in Cook County” — horrifying both in the inability of Cook County Animal Control to unite a lost pet with its owner, and the stunning level of waste and incompetence.
Animal Control is about rabies, mostly. It gets most of its funding from the sale of rabies tags — and spends much of that money to pay employees to type the rabies tag data into a very old computer system.
There are 22 full-time employees, and 13 of them spend most of their time processing tags, often earning comp time for working during their lunch hours, according to the IG’s report.
Most of the data is submitted by clinics, shelters, veterinarians and rescue groups that perform the actual rabies vaccinations, but Animal Control’s system is so dated that the information can’t be uploaded easily, if at all. So staffers do it by hand. If this reminds you of the Cook County clerk of the circuit court office, join the club.
The IG recommends a web-based system so veterinarians and others can input the data themselves, freeing up resources for more meaningful services (like helping you find Bowser). . . .
There are six employees who patrol the unincorporated area for strays. Their workday includes time spent commuting to and from work in their take-home government vehicles. For one employee, that’s three hours a day. If heavy traffic means their door-to-door workday lasts longer than eight hours, they get comp time.
What Animal Control doesn’t do is provide any assistance to owners of lost pets. There are more than a dozen shelters that a lost pet might be brought to, and no coordination among them, let alone any sort of centralized database.
This is just mind-boggling. This is Greece-level incompetence (The Full Catastrophe, which I read and blogged about in July, describes a multitude of government offices in which computers gather dust while the bureaucrats continue with paper and pencil and endless paper files for such things as disability claims), and union protection of jobs without regard to whether they provide a service or not.
And it invites the question: how many other government agencies are like this, hidden away, preserving their man-hour-heavy way of doing things?
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