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.