Flatter: HISA has explaining to do, and it is overdue

Mom used to scowl at me when I did something wrong. In my frequent bursts of disobedience, she would glare at me. And then she would sternly ask me the dreaded question.

“Who do you think you are?”

More than a half-century later I feel like my overwrought mom. The fuel for my rage comes from the brazen sanctimony of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority.

This feeling preceded last weekend, when we collectively wondered how HISA would react to all the racetrack deaths at Saratoga. This was before we had our communal feeling of sorrowful resignation that morphed into a cauldron of social-media anger when New York Thunder broke down on the same Saratoga homestretch where we lost Maple Leaf Mel exactly three weeks earlier.

Even before the cumulative anger turned into a kneejerk call to rip out every dirt track in America and replace each one with a synthetic surface because statistics say it is safer even though six of the eight racing deaths at Saratoga this summer were on the turf and despite the fact Tapeta and Polytrack and other rubber stews never have been put to the test in outposts where some of the cheapest, most dangerous horse races are run ... taking a breath here ... my rage against the HISA machine already was on the boil.

It was stoked last week when I was directed to have a look at some of the documents that were quietly posted on the HISA website this summer. The key word was quietly. As in discreetly. Even stealthy.

There it was in sotto voce. A 990 form that was filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Thinking at first it was the sort of pro-forma number crunch that has all the sizzle of a lease renewal, I ignored it. That was before I was urged to study it closely. So I did.

And there on page 2 of schedule J of form 990 for the year 2022 were the numbers I had been longing to see. Finally laid bare for all to see, hiding in plain sight in the crannies of the website, were the salaries that had been under wraps since HISA first was signed into law 2 1/2 years ago.

Lisa Lazarus, the chief executive officer, was paid $442,307. Remember, she did not come on board until Feb. 15, 2022. Do the old pro-rata math, and her annual salary comes to $504,506, not counting a $5,769 deferment.

That means Lazarus makes 25 percent more than President Biden. Stealing Babe Ruth’s apocryphal self-comparison to Herbert Hoover, who had the better year? Straight Lines for $1,600, Ken.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a lightning rod of a different sort, is the highest-paid government employee, and he makes about $20,000 less than Lazarus in his job to preserve human life.

The Federal Trade Commission is supposed to lord over HISA. That is how the law was written. That is what judges have had to remind Lazarus and her minions. Yet no two FTC employees combined make as much as Lazarus.

It was not just her. Hank Zeitlin, the former Equibase executive who was HISA’s caretaker boss before Lazarus, was paid $314,827 last year in his ongoing role as a consultant. That was on top of the $211,993 he got in 2021. Chief financial officer Jim Gates made $190,185. Director of racetrack safety Ann McGovern was paid $164,477.

Those were just the salaries paid while HISA was being built. We still do not know what the likes of Steve Keech, the chief technology officer, and Marc Guilfoil, HISA’s liaison to racing states, are being paid. Stay tuned for next year’s tax filing. Just don’t expect a promotional announcement saying when we might see it.

The filing of the tax forms was announced in an Aug. 9 news release emailed to the media. At the bottom of that release was another paragraph saying the 2024 budget would be shared “in the coming days” on the HISA website.

It was Aug. 17, eight coming days later, when the nearly $81 million spending plan finally was posted, and it came without any further notice. So, too, did the whopping, one-week, public-comment period that came and went. For anyone who had a desire to weigh in and be heard, it was like having to answer the door every so often to make sure there were no visitors, because HISA did not bother to knock. For eight days.

Even if it is accepted that late is better than never, what kind of bang has HISA been giving us for these bucks? For a while it seemed like it was only the admonishment of jockeys for excessive crop use. Then it was the rollout of medication suspensions that were walked back when someone in power realized that the guilty-before-proven-innocent tactics might add to the five lawsuits HISA has been trying to deflect.

More to the point of Saratoga and its eight racing deaths and its four training deaths this summer, HISA said it has been investigating. Yet it took 19 days to admit it. Why it acted like a puppy trying a dog door for the first time is not known, because direct questions of what took so long to make this public have gone unanswered.

Worse yet, HISA completely misled one reporter who directly asked two days after Maple Leaf Mel’s death whether the authority had dispatched any of its investigative envoys to Saratoga. John Cherwa of the Los Angeles Times asked HISA spokesperson Mandy Minger, “Just wondering if HISA plans to in any way involve itself in the spate of deaths at Saratoga Race Course? Has HISA been asked for a consultation or has there been any conversations with (the New York Racing Association)?”

Instead of saying the correct answer of yes, Minger replied, “HISA requires local racing officials and safety personnel to conduct a full review of every equine fatality under HISA’s jurisdiction. The reviews of this weekend’s fatalities are already underway.”

When HISA finally admitted Aug. 24 that NYRA was not alone and that it actually had jumped into the Saratoga investigation on the day Maple Leaf Mel died, Cherwa immediately asked what gives?

No response. Not until a week later.

It was Thursday when Minger apologized to Cherwa for any unintentional confusion and then reset the bar, saying, “As stated on Aug. 7, HISA requires local racing officials and safety personnel to conduct a full review of every equine fatality under HISA’s jurisdiction. At that time, reviews of recent fatalities at Saratoga were already underway, as we shared. HISA was at the time and is now in contact with NYRA and (the New York State Gaming Commission) as various reviews are ongoing.”

It feels like a lawyer or three might have been in on that response.

At least Cherwa got an answer. My entreaties asking Minger and then Lazarus why it took 19 days to reveal the Saratoga investigation have yet to be answered.

My own history with HISA has been checkered, to put it kindly. My criticism of its covert ways of doing business have been frequent, and I was early in providing a platform for its opponents, if only to try and balance the racing aristocracy that lavishly endorsed its rollout.

I actually was among the first to reach out to Lazarus to congratulate her in January 2022 on her appointment as CEO. In time I booked her for an interview for my March 18, 2022, podcast. Or so I thought.

On a Zoom call to record the interview the day before, as I literally was about to launch into the 3-2-1 countdown to signal its start, a communications handler jumped in to tell me the entire conversation was meant to be on background for a written piece and not for the podcast.

Mind you, every communication leading up to that interview was built on the premise that this would be a for-the-record conversation. Seriously, it would be a little difficult to put a silenced conversation in the middle of a podcast. I still have all the preliminaries on file. Not once were the phrases “on background” or “off the record” used until seconds before the interview began.

The conversation with Lazarus went forward, and I thought it went well for both of us.

Balancing my understanding of the rules before that pre-snap audible while trying to respect what suddenly was thrown at me, I still used some quotes from the interview in what I thought was an even-handed, written piece that week. As for the podcast, a substitute guest was hastily arranged. The audio of the Lazarus interview lives on only in the recesses of my laptop.

Rather than pick a fight with the communications handler who no longer works for HISA, I endured a gentle scolding by phone, countered with what I felt were the original terms of engagement and parted company civilly.

That experience was a microcosm of what has transpired in the nearly 18 months since in dealing with HISA. I am not alone. Colleagues trying to shine a light into the dark recesses of its operation have been reminded that while the authority is carrying out a government mandate, it is not a government agency. Therefore, HISA does not feel compelled to respond to our demands for, dare I say, transparency.

The National Turf Writers and Broadcasters, of which I am a member, are on this. My optimism for a resolution favorable to the media, however, is offset by the reality that the public’s right to know does not mean a damn thing anymore. If we cannot see a given President’s tax returns, what hope do we have of finding out about any communication between HISA and NYRA?

HISA announced Tuesday that it added two more safety checks for the final two weeks of the Saratoga meet. One was the addition of a veterinary screening for all horses after they are entered and before they race. The other was a review by “seven experts” of the dirt and turf tracks before racing resumed Wednesday. One presumes the Saratoga courses passed the test, but of course, there was no formal announcement. NYRA offered some guidance about how it inspects the dirt and turf, but there was nothing more from HISA.

The very creation of HISA was catalyzed by the deaths of 37 racehorses at Santa Anita in the 2019. HISA appeared to grow up when it was a guiding prod in the early shutdown and transfer of the spring meet at Churchill Downs, where 13 deaths were confirmed between late April and late June.

Taking 19 days to go public with an existing investigation and 24 days through another six deaths to invoke what might be only the illusion of new safety protocols at Saratoga should not be acceptable. Not to HISA allies who have pined for a cleanup of the sport. Not to HISA critics who only will be emboldened by the missteps of an August that went far worse than the Taylor Swift song by the same name.

It is time for HISA to be adult about the mission it was established to carry out. As much as it means holding the sport accountable, it also means being accountable. That applies to everyone in the authority up to $500,000 at a time.

In short, HISA, who do you think you are?