News Jul 2, 2014 at 4:00 pm

Taking Off the Cap

Comments

1
"Do it for the children." Do voters still fall for that canard? Why not just tax the children?
2
WAIT YOU'VE GOT A CITY HALL DRINKING GAME? I WANNA PIECE A THAT.
3
ARGH. 15% is nothing for a small non-profit! What is direct service and what is administrative? It all depends on how sophisticated your book keeper is, and besides, you CAN'T have the direct service WITHOUT the administrative "overhead." You pay some counselor $13 an hour, but then you have the pesky overhead of the insurance needed for your organization to provide direct service to kids, health insurance costs, electric bills, or how about the administrative support time to interface with the Board/community who make sure you don't take the money and buy a yacht, and all of those evil "non"-direct service dollars. This administrative = bad is infuriating and leads to non-profits that are underfunded and don't have capacity to give the best quality services that their participants deserve, because foundations and donors want their dollars to be "direct service" only!
4
It's a bit disingenuous to claim the the Children's Levy is model of bureaucratic thrift. First, the tax is easy to collect (it's included in property taxes). Second, someone else collects the tax (Multnomah County) and hands the money over to the city. So, in some sense, collection costs are near zero.

Then, look at what the Children's Levy does ... It's main job is to cut checks. How hard is that?

Sure the levy folks have the costs of the so-called audits. Take a look at one of those audits sometime. The "audits" do nothing more that check to make sure that the people who were promised checks actually got the checks. There's no audit of the effectiveness of the programs funded.

Bottom line - The Children's Levy has one job: Take money from property owners and hand it over to nonprofits. It does that job pretty well. However, for such a simple job, seems to me that 5% is a bit high for administrative costs.

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