Flatter: HISA’s lavish spending is worthy of Golden Fleece

One might wonder what falling in love might have to do with keeping racehorses safe at the track and free from abusive medication. What they have in common is wasteful, federal spending.

It was a long wait for the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority to post the tax form showing where it spent some of its money last year. The same form for 2022 was made public the following summer. For the 2023 report, we had to cool our heels until the brink of winter, hitting refresh every so often on the HISA website to see if there was a stocking stuffer.

What we finally learned this week was that for all its protestations that money is tight, the non-profit HISA turned a $4.6 million profit last year. That was quite a turnaround from the $3.3 million deficit shown on ye olde form 990 for 2022.

Lawyers working for Churchill Downs Inc. and the New York Racing Association must have barked a collective a-ha when that document finally dropped. If civil suits can have smoking guns, this was just the weapon they needed to refute HISA’s response to the federal case that the two racetrack behemoths filed last week over the way their annual bill has been figured and, they say, bloated.

“CDI and NYRA are refusing to comply with the assessment methodology, which is designed to ensure HISA is adequately funded,” HISA CEO Lisa Lazarus said.

This would be the same Lisa Lazarus who we learned was paid $586,547 last year with another $13,200 in added value, whatever that meant. Put it all together, and Lazarus finds herself in the same neighborhood as a married couple who made $619,976. By name they were Joseph and Jill Biden.

Make no mistake. This is not a personal attack on Lazarus or an endorsement of the Bidens. One would be impertinent, the other unfashionable. Instead, this is meant to question the pork being cultivated in the name of equines.

Which brings me back to human affection. There used to be a senator from Wisconsin named William Proxmire, whose Golden Fleece award was created 50 years ago in March. At a time when anti-government cynicism was on the boil, Proxmire’s calling out of a Washington money pits was an entertaining, monthly catharsis for a nation of frustrated taxpayers.

Proxmire bestowed his inaugural Golden Fleece on the National Science Foundation for what he called the “biggest boondoggle of the year.” That was a research project to find out why people fall in love. The NSF’s tab for the federal government came to $83,000. That was in the era of Secretariat. An inflated half-century later in the era of Thorpedo Anna, that would come to nearly $500,000. That puts the love study Proxmire castigated in the same ballpark as we find ourselves paying for the chief of the racing police force, which made 10 cents on the dollar last year.

Lazarus is not the only one living high on the HISA hog. That same tax form showed a staff of 23, not all by name, and a volunteer force of 22. The eight people whose salaries were divulged appeared on a page that lists, in the words of the Internal Revenue Service, “compensation of officers, directors, trustees, key employees, highest compensated employees and independent contractors.”

Even conceding that Lazarus or anyone who holds the job of HISA CEO deserves about $600,000 a year, one wonders why former Equibase boss Hank Zeitlin still grosses $305,683. He spent all of eight months preceding Lazarus as the temporary CEO before getting the honorific of consultant for 2023.

Various department heads at HISA make between $151,673 and $262,488 a year, and the top bean counter Jim Gates gets $344,340. When I shared all this information Tuesday on texts with current and former racing professionals, I got the same response over and over. “I’m in the wrong line of work.”

It is entirely reasonable for HISA to say that its money balloon from last year could be deflated with higher expenses this year. The 2023 ledger was helped by the fact that medication regulations and the expenses to enforce them were not on the clock for the first 4 1/2 months.

For now, though, it is hard to see a sympathetic figure in this pile of money. This week’s Global Symposium on Racing in Tucson, Ariz., might not have helped matters, either.

“HISA must have had like 15 or 20 people there,” said John Cherwa, the Los Angeles Times racing correspondent and my podcast co-host who was on the scene. “You want to talk to HISA or (Horseracing Integrity & Welfare Unit) people, that’s the place to do it.”

That would mean 15 or 20 flights and 15 or 20 hotel rooms for as many as four nights each. How many HISA types does it take to screw in a light bulb? I don’t know. I forgot to see if they were illuminating the no-vacancy sign.

Even accounting for the fact a laudable drop in horse deaths has happened on HISA’s watch, on Lazarus’s watch, we really do not know the full story. A fatality rate of 0.8 per 1,000 starts in races has been reported at HISA tracks, but comparable figures are lacking for how many horses died in training. They have been promised this winter, so let’s wait and see.

It would be easy to contend and hard to debate that saving horses’ lives has been worth the money, but that truism comes with smoke. A safer sport does not justify lavish and wasteful spending.

Even though they are not usually perceived as warm and fuzzy, CDI and NYRA are trying to flesh all this out in their lawsuit that says big purses for races became an illegal prism for setting HISA fees. Unlike preceding litigation that is using a constitutional paper chase, they really are following the money.

All this kvetching about a roomful of salaries and a balance sheet filled eight figures at a time may be only rhetorical in the end. I do not expect Lazarus or any of her acolytes to experience shrinkage of their direct deposits. Nor do I expect Churchill, a company that made $417 million last year, and NYRA, a revenue-rich non-profit that just got a $455 million state loan to rebuild Belmont Park, to back down from their legal position.

It would be nice, though, if somewhere in all this morass of black ink that there was some consideration for the people who really make this game go. A little something, you know, for the effort.

Is there room anywhere in there for reduced takeout? I am asking for a friend. I bet somewhere up there, so is the late senator from Wisconsin.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below and at RonFlatterRacingPod@gmail.com are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.