The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles is taking the city of Long Beach to court for what they claim is a wrongful 30-day eviction order directing them to leave the facility that it built and now shares with the city near El Dorado Regional Park.
Attorneys for SPCALA filed court papers in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday seeking a temporary restraining order stopping the eviction for now, pending a future hearing on whether a preliminary injunction should be issued against the city.
“Absent injunctive relief, spcaLA will suffer immediate and irreparable harm in that it will lose possession and use of a property in which it has invested over $10 million for an indeterminate period of time until the matter is able to be resolved by this court,” the organization’s lawyers state.
The attorneys further contend in their pleadings that absent immediate relief, the charity will not be able to continue providing life-saving animal care to Long Beach and surrounding communities to the detriment of the animals, who will endure stress from having to be moved to another facility. (Long Beach has said it’s prepared to step in and care for the animals.)
A hearing on the organization’s motion is scheduled for Wednesday, one week before a March 26 deadline for SPCALA to vacate the building. If it doesn’t, the city has threatened its own legal action.
The city informed SPCALA on Feb. 24 that it was terminating the organization’s lease and kicking it out of the facility for “multiple breaches” of the contract, according to correspondence the Long Beach Post obtained through a public records request.
The city and SPCALA have cooperated on the animal adoption center at 7700 E. Spring St. since 1998 when they partnered to address overwhelming euthanasia rates that Long Beach and other municipal shelters were experiencing at the time.
The intention of the partnership, according to the city, was for SPCALA to construct and operate a modern, state-of-the-art campus that would provide animal control facilities led by the city-run Long Beach Animal Care Services (LBACS) and an adoption center managed by SPCALA. The nonprofit also host a wide range of educational programs like dog training classes, a summer camp and domestic violence survivor services at the campus.
The two parties’ relationship has since soured.
In an eviction notice to SPCALA, an attorney for the city accused the nonprofit of taking over too many common areas at the facility, which he said were supposed to be split 50-50. He said the nonprofit also caused a rodent infestation by not properly maintaining the building.
Most notably, he said SPCALA has begun neglecting its primary duty of adopting out animals taken in by LBACS. It took only 76 from the city in 2024 compared to 1,341 in 2019, according to the city’s numbers.
This “troubling trend” has caused overcrowding in the city’s portion of the shelter, according to the eviction notice.
SPCALA responded by calling the city’s data “distorted” and accusing local officials of using “manufactured claims in a bad faith effort to wrest control of the facility away from spcaLA.”
The nonprofit said there was “no truth” to the city’s accusations of losing access to shared space, and it laid responsibility for the plummeting adoption number on Long Beach officials, saying they “affirmatively requested that spcaLA stop taking their animals for adoption.”
According to SPCALA’s court papers, the organization and the city “enjoyed a mutually beneficial and respectful relationship” until 2019, when the city hired a new manager for LBACS.
“Almost immediately, LBACS’ side of the facility quickly deteriorated into a hoarding situation, with issues of overcrowding, poor animal husbandry, hazardous conditions and more,” SPCALA lawyers contend in their court papers, adding that the city “has no right to terminate” the lease, which has almost 30 years remaining.
City News Service, Jacob Sisneros and Jeremiah Dobruck contributed to this report.