Meow Meow Foundation Asks Los Angeles County Officials for Critical Changes to Camp-Related Childhood Safety Oversight

Meow Meow Foundation has issued a demand letter to the Los Angeles Department of Public Health and to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger.

Read the demand letter HERE.

According to the foundation, county health officials have not yet acted upon a number of pledges they made last year regarding inadequate camp safety and water safety measures. Foundation principals Doug Forbes and Elena Matyas, along with board member Liliana Coronado, met with Barger last September and with health chief Dr. Barbara Ferrer and her Environmental Health Services team leader Liza Frias in early February.

“We alerted these officials about the fact that more young people will die or otherwise suffer if the county fails to exact effective camp and water safety policies,” Forbes said. “The county has not yet accommodated any of our advice or lived up to their word, and young people drowned and became infected with the coronavirus.”

Forbes said that officials and residents will never know the true scope of the consequences, however, because the county does not license or inspect camps or demand reporting measures.

“We warned the state health department about its disregard, and now we are doing the same with the county,” said Matyas. “Officials are ultimately the citizens’ employees, so when they ignore this colossal oversight gap, young people unnecessarily die and suffer, but the citizens are paying the. ultimate price”

Barger said she would give Forbes and Matyas the opportunity to speak before the County Board of Supervisors last fall. That invitation was never extended. Her health deputy also said the office would work with the foundation on an official Motion to improve water safety. That also never transpired.

Ferrer and Frias said they would provide relevant policy and procedural documents to the foundation and work together to develop a more effective oversight model. Documents were never provided. Further conversations were not afforded. Although the pandemic has encumbered the department, it nonetheless invested time and resources in affording guidance to camps so that they could reopen this past spring. The department ignored numerous warnings by Forbes and Matyas about inadequate CDC camp reopening guidance, which has since resulted in thousands of COVID-19 infections at camps across the nation.

MMF has determined that the county, the most populous in the country, does not inspect camps as it claimed it did. MMF also discovered, through a meeting with the tax office, that the county does not even require business licenses for camps or classify them in any way in tax code. It is not apparent why camps have been exempted in such a way.

Forbes and Matyas researched the region’s camp industry and approximated that 400-500 camps make their home in LA county. They said that the most shocking fact is that nobody in the county or in the state, for that matter, has been able to simply give them an approximate number of camps and campers. They said it has been tragic that state and local agencies have actually asked them for their foundation research because they do not understand the scope of this deadly and costly issue.