BOSS - another Berkeley boondoggle

The Editor

The Berkeley Daily Planet

Berkeley, CA

To the Editor:

Your recent front page story, "BOSS Accounting Woes Force Cutbacks, Layoffs" (The Daily Planet, October 21-23) was very interesting.

The Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency (BOSS) agency, a non-profit overseer of several programs to help the East Bay homeless, seems to be plagued by accounting errors and omissions. In the middle of the article it is revealed that BOSS has been staffing the accounting and bookkeeping departments with its former clients: homeless from the streets. So this is not a case of the lunatics running the asylum, but merely of the lunatics auditing the books of the asylum. Hmm. Just what exactly is the root of problems of doing government bookkeeping in the East Bay? Is it the air? Is it the fog? It there a noxious mental drift from Baghdad-by-the-Bay? Or is it merely the coming together of white upper class liberal guilt interacting with the allegedly downtrodden lower classes?

It seems to be part and parcel of the functioning of the school districts and local governments in the East Bay that they cannot add and subtract dollars and cents when attempting to create and maintain budgets. Are these folks all graduates of Oakland and Berkeley public schools? Maybe they are operating under the notion that if they don't add up the bills, that the deficits won't exist. Dreamland, thy name is East Bay.

BOSS has placed some forty (40) homeless into housing with a budget of about $5,000,000 per year: this amounts to $125,000 per formerly homeless person per year. That should cover the rent, I guess. Does it really require one hundred staff members to cut rent subsidy checks to forty persons per year? What do the other ninety-nine staff members do in the remaining fifty-one weeks each year? Assuming that the forty formerly homeless persons each get $10,000 per year in rent subsidies, this amounts to an overhead rate of over 90%. Kids, can you say "boondoggle?" Maybe BOSS needs to hire some outside auditors, say some good Republicans from Florida, à la Arnold? Maybe Berkeley and Oakland could also place "Arithmetic Free Zone" signs on its borders.

Yours truly,

James K. Sayre

21 October 2003