In addition to longstanding concerns by complainants about the veterinary board's Investigative Committees, it appears that there have been internal concerns by staff members regarding the investigators' fitness to serve. A June 2024 memo by the board's executive director obtained on July 24th of this year indicates continued concerns about their ability to "remain focused" or even "remember the statutes/rules from month to month." Recent changes were suggested as an excuse to allow some members to "gently retire."
A portion of the June 19, 2024 board meeting discussed proposed changes to the veterinary board's two investigative committees. A fixture of veterinary board operations for decades, incoming complaints are usually assigned to one of two Investigative Committees (AM or PM). Complainants have often themselves complained about the operations of these committees, indicating in personal conversations after the fact that the investigators seemed biased toward the veterinarian respondent, unfamiliar with the case, or uninterested in performing basic investigative techniques on the complaints before them.
Questions have also been raised about the nature of the Investigative Committees themselves. Several board members including Jessica Creager and Robyn Jaynes served on the ICs before using them as a stepping stone to a board appointment, with longstanding investigator Amrit Rai proactively resigning her position to follow the same path. Investigative committees are also often packed by the buddy system: Veterinarian Robert Kritsberg secured an appointment for his friend, health care exec Steve Seiler, while Cameron Dow was appointed while family friend Nikki Frost served on the board, later being replaced by his own dad, former board member Steven Dow. This type of behavior never appears to have triggered any alarm bells among the Assistant Attorneys-General involved in the board's operations, nor did state politicians have any concerns in promoting some of these same individuals to the full board. It was, as they say, business as usual.
Which is why it was all the more peculiar for the board to vote to disband its two existing committees and combine them into a single "super" committee, something like the bureaucratic version of Marvel's Avengers. Also interesting was the notion that reducing the number of investigative members and committees would somehow help them keep up with their ever-growing complaint workload. Yet this was all asserted to be true, with much of the justification coming from an internal memo by Executive Director Victoria Whitmore recommending drastic changes.
We were able to obtain a copy of the memo as a public record, and it's truly quite the read. It appears that the Investigative Committees have themselves been under suspicion by the board's own staff, not because of any concerns over bias, but rather over allegations of rank inability to do the jobs they were appointed by the board to do. In Whitmore's own words: "We have long struggled with one or both of the committees at some point regarding some of the members’ ability to remain focused in the group discussions and questions to the Respondent and Complainant, and remember the statutes/rules from month to month." One wonders how long these concerns were prevalent among the board staff, including the Executive Director, and how the board itself was unaware of this problem given that they have to approve all IC members.
If the memo is to be believed, it appears the PM Committee was particularly handicapped by these problems, as it "has particularly struggled to stay on track and often takes over 2 hours longer than the A.M. group to complete the same number of cases." Whitmore goes on to note that it's "frustrating for other excellent members" not to mention the "case participants who end up sitting around all afternoon." You see, that's the problem with these investigators: They're really inconsiderate when it comes to people's schedules. (One assumes that Whitmore's referring to veterinarians and their attorneys having to sit around all afternoon rather than delays for complainants. The people I've spoken to had great concerns about the investigative process being rigged but never had concerns about waiting to speak for a dead pet; if anything, they've related a feeling that the entire matter was hurried right out the door.)
Was there a particularly egregious example of this that led to a sudden need for change? Not according to the memo. Rather, Tracy Riendeau, the Senior Medical Investigator on the board's staff, is "moving out of state and working 100% remotely most of the time" and her replacement "will be on a long learning curve." To make things all better, the staff has decided to find "efficiencies in the IC process," and one of the main efficiencies to be found is to axe half of the committee members. Again quoting from the memo, Reindeau's pending plan to protect pets from far away is "the most diplomatic way to allow some members to gently retire from the IC who largely stick around to help Tracy because they so greatly value her."
That last sentence in particular brings up its own set of questions, of course. The British author and naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson once formulated Parkinson's Law, an adage that work tends to fill the amount of time available for it; he also noted a highly related tendency for persons in bureaucratic roles to essentially create work for each other. In this case we have what may be a unique strain of this particular infection: Riendeau was allegedly overburdened covering for the same incompetent investigators who stick around to help her do her job. It's also touching that such concern is shown for the feelings of these investigative committee members, though apparently none for persons whose cases were heard by members apparently not fit for purpose.
And what was the approved remedy? A "super" committee, one capable of doing twice the work with half the overhead. One single committee that eliminates the need for duplicate agendas, recordings, quorum calls, and other activites that harsh the bureaucratic buzz down at the board twice a month. One almost imagines an administrative-state version of the intro montage from The Six Million Dollar Man, rebuilding the committee better than it was before. Whitmore and Riendeau (the latter of whom allegedly "forgot" an investigative committee member she worked with for years) put together a list of top people and the board approved it after a brief discussion.
And who were these top people who were not only good noodles but could remember statutes and lasso paperwork with the best of them? At the top of the list was certified equine veterinarian and horse-semen salesperson Justin McCormick, a man with deep experience in investigative matters (he and his veterinary-partner wife have had their joint equine practice repeatedly investigated and then exonerated by the board over the years). Another was consulting veterinary toxicologist, Midwestern University adjunct, and Banfield boy Jarrod Butler. Also included was Investigative Committee newbie Stanley Rubin, a veterinarian with academic and private practice experience and a co-author on Canine Internal Medicine Secrets: Questions and Answers Reveal the Secrets of Canine Internal Medicine. Thrown in to round out the committee with the requisite public members were long-term committee member and relative no-name Carolyn Ratajack and professional golfer Gordon Bennett. Bennett, a former military inspector heavily involved in the greyhound racing-to-rescue pipeline, is also relatively new; that's not to say that he doesn't know the board, of course, as Craig Nausley recused himself during the former's appointment as an IC member. But at the board, connections like that are just par for the course; Nausley himself referenced an unnamed former board member as suggesting he apply for the board.
What if one of these superheroes is unavailable? Who will answer the clarion call? Under Whitmore and Riendeau's list, two of those on call will be Robert Kritsberg (who served on the board including three terms as chair before bouncing around on both ICs) and his handpicked buddy Steve Seiler. Also thrown in is former board member and IC member Steven Dow, a former board member who replaced his son Cameron on the Investigative Committee, and whose family and clinic have connections to former board member Julie Mumford and current board chair Nikki Frost. Public member Mike Booth rounded out the final four.
But even with these massive improvements and rightsizings there's still a need for more investigators. Investigator Amrit Rai—a veterinarian who once refused to verbally confirm that she read my own case file during my own IC hearing—resigned in June 2024 to seek a gubernatorial promotion to the full board by none other than Arizona's top political animal, Katie Hobbs. Hobbs was, of course, a recipient of a joint letter by roughly twenty of us from the Veterinary Victims League site, but none of us ever got a response. Perhaps she'll find Amrit Rai more worthy of dialogue than any of us. And that talent search for the new and improved committee has also included some new and improved veterinarian-respondents we'll cover in a future update.
All that said, it's easy to focus on the details while ignoring the big picture. They keep forgetting what they're doing! They can't even remember statutes! And it appears all of that is true if the board's own professional staff are to be believed. But getting dragged into a game of calling balls and strikes neglects how this situation got here in the first place. Any committee would be somewhat hindered in fixing this mess given the laxity of Arizona statutes and the permissive interpretation embodied by the Arizona Administrative Code. That much is certain.
But that morass didn't create itself ex nihilo. It's what happens when a profession starts out as cattle mechanics and goes on to find greater purchase among companion animals. It's perpetuated in quarters that view those same animals either as Teddy Ruxpin dolls for adults or as future wards of the state down at an underfunded and underregulated pound or rescue. The exact names and faces are really more of a detail. Whatever group you assemble, taken from those worldviews, will modulo a few differences produce similar results. To quote Homer Simpson misquoting Al Pacino, the whole freakin' system is out of order. What you see here is just one symptom rather than the disease itself.
But it's always good to end on a positive note, and the real winners thus far are any of Tracy Riendeau's pets. If she's going be doing the vast majority of future investigating over an out-of-state broadband modem, those critters have made an escape. Much like the public school administrator's children who actually attend a posh private or parochial school, none of those pets have to navigate a world created by the Arizona veterinary community or its erstwhile regulators. That's not to say that most other jurisdictions around are going to be much better—for that, you'd need a big move involving either an Airbus to a distant land or a DeLorean into America's distant future. But at least they won't live and die under some oft-forgotten Arizona statute.