According to a May 6, 2020, Boulder Monitor story, the Lewis & Clark Humane Society in Helena “takes in 125-154 animals a year from Jefferson County, and in turn, charges the county $125 for each one.” For those without a calculator handy, that’s $19,250 that the county is spending (at the high end) annually.
It doesn’t take a mathematician to question the thinking here. Are we really discussing spending $328,000 (and taxing our citizens $265,365) per year to save less than $20,000 per year? Does that make sense to anybody?
It also doesn’t take an accountant to tell you that if your annual operating costs are $328,000 and your levy generates $265,365 that you’ve got an annual shortfall of about $63,000. A recent article cited claims that the gap will be closed by donations and grants—but what happens when the gap isn’t closed by donations? The annual operating cost, like everything else, is highly likely to increase. What then? If passed, you can bet the levy will increase right along with elevated costs.
At the current annual expenditure of less than $20,000 per year, even if you operated the facility for zero dollars annually, it’d take 35 years at minimum to break even with the construction cost alone (and that’s with a hugely optimistic assumption that the facility would be built on budget).
How on earth does this make fiscal sense? And how many times must the citizens say no?
