The California State Athletic Commission held a meeting last week in San Diego that was full of surprises. Zach Arnold of Fight Opinion wrote an exhaustive article covering the meeting and the possible fallout for the commission’s next fiscal year. Basically, their fiscal year ends on June 30th and they’re almost out of cash. It’s not exactly unusual for a government agency to be short on cash at the end of a fiscal year. But the big problem seems to be the next fiscal year, because they don’t have any money in the bank and the Department of Consumer affairs has sent the CSAC a letter indicating it is on the path to insolvency.
To put this into perspective, the commission’s April 9th meeting in Sacramento indicated that finances were tight but that business would be able to proceed as normal. Within a two month time span, the DCA fired off an insolvency letter to the commission stating that everything was going to hell on the finances.
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(Executive Director) George Dodd talked about how there are spending limits set by legislation and that he feels the commission is on target to still make it but the problem is what can be spent versus what they are taking in for revenue. He stated that the DCA observed back in March that the math was not adding up. Stunningly, Dodd said that the revenue projections were off by more than $500,000 because of decreasing revenues as compared to the last few years of business. He does feel that the commission can remain solvent, however.
There is a lot of juicy stuff in the article, including Dodd’s odd excuses for the loss of revenue and the mistakes that have been made in terms of hiring and assigning staff. He thinks that too many inspectors are working events and that Strikeforce being bought by Zuffa was very damaging for revenue in California, amongst other things.
Arnold indicates that the commission could be shut down because of this and it is in the title of his article, but I believe that’s a little far-fetched. It’s a very political game and it’s not really surprising that all sorts of doomsday rhetoric is being bandied about. Still though, I find it highly unlikely that the California state government would let the commission disintegrate. Either way it does look like they’re in for a pretty tough fiscal year coming up. I’d recommend reading the whole article or even listening to the whole meeting (which is linked in Zach’s piece) to get a clearer picture of what’s going on.
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