This week was busy with another non-profit merger;
The Butterfly House & Aquarium has raised $4.2 million toward its capital campaign to expand aquarium exhibits, which can be applied toward the project, Otto-Pepper said.
Of course the Butterfly House is merging with the Zoo and it seems they have raised a lot of money.
LSS is also merging with the Multi-Cultural center, which I fully support, and probably is long past due.
But you have to wonder what is going on with their bank accounts.
As you know, the Levitt has yet to release numbers from their 2021 season even as their 2022 season has been finished for over a month.
The Denny Sanford Premier center is up for contract renewal and they are taking in millions in profits and commissions.
According to the Pavilion’s annual report in 2021 they had over $5 million in the bank. This is after basically skipping a year due to Covid. You also have to remember that we not only give the Pavilion a yearly operational subsidy but we give millions each year fixing the building due to the poor construction of the facility to begin with (windows, roofs, etc.)
Maybe it is time the city council takes a hard look at how much we are subsidizing these facilities taking into consideration how much is in their bank accounts. Do we really need to subsidize the Pavilion, the Zoo, the Denty and other facilities when they may have millions in their bank accounts. I don’t think so.
I’m worried about this Zoo/Butterfly merger. Won’t the animals dominate? AND, will they begin to cage the butterflies, or begin to apply its honor system to the Zoo?
I once went to a zoo which was ran on the honor system. It was called Africa.
Nonprofits pay no income and most sales tax. Of course they’ll have lots of equity for acquisitions. They wouldn’t be profitable in a private business climate. Slow down the acquisitions. You’re set. We know this. It doesn’t look good for when you ask for more unnecessary funding.
Nonprofits are great. They are so valuable for the homeless, the hungry, and the needy. Unfortunately they are usually ran by executives making a great salary with benefits. Show me any charitable organization and I’ll show you lazy entitled executives making bank while volunteers or low paid people make it work
In South Dakota, nonprofits are quite simply the vessel through which government handouts are laundered to the pockets of patrons to the political establishment (read as “those claiming to be ‘small government’ Republicans).
Afterall, it’s not ‘Big Government’ to ladle millions upon millions of dollars into nonprofits, is it?
And it’s not a government handout if you’ve ‘earned it’ (a six figure salary) as an executive member of a nonprofit, is it?
I can hardly wait to see the laudering of government funds as annual stipends from the City of Sioux Falls and the State of South Dakota (from both the Governor’s Office of Economic Development AND the Board of Regents) through the nonprofit (DSU Applied Research Corporation) which will oversee 500 jobs and operations at the DSU Cyberlab.
“Oh look! Former Governor Daugaard’s daughter and spouse to soon-to-be District 13 State Representative Tonis Venhuizen is among those first in line at the DSU-ARC nonprofit!”