Now, the nonprofit arms of these billion-dollar businesses are looking to gain a special exemption from the state’s rules on charitable fundraising.

A proposal speeding through the legislature would grant nonprofit organizations affiliated with professional sports franchises a special exemption from the state’s laws on charitable raffles.

Senate Bill 549, authored by state Sen. Isadore Hall, D-South Bay, would exempt nonprofits affiliated with sports franchises from Proposition 17, a 2000 ballot measure that allowed private nonprofit groups to conduct raffles. That voter-approved initiative requires 90 percent of a raffle’s proceeds to be spent on charitable purposes.

SB594 would allow sports-affiliated nonprofits to run a 50-50 raffle, where half of the proceeds can go to a gambler. According to the bill’s text, the only eligible organizations are those connected to “a team from the Major League Baseball, National Hockey League, National Basketball Association, National Football League, Women’s National Basketball Association, or Major League Soccer, or a private, nonprofit organization established by the Professional Golfers’ Association of America, Ladies Professional Golf Association, or National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing.”

Sports charity donates to California Legislative Black Caucus

Proponents of the special perk for sports franchises say that it encourages more philanthropic giving.

“Results of 50-50 charitable raffles in over 29 states have been tremendous,” Senator Hall, the bill’s author, recently testified before the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee. “This measure will supplement great charitable work done by professional sports franchises throughout the state.”

That charitable work includes a nonprofit organization managed by state lawmakers.

According to its most recent tax return, the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation has contributed $15,000 to the California Legislative Black Caucus. The current vice-chair of the Black Caucus is none other than Senator Isadore Hall, III — the author of SB 549.

Last session, Asm. Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer Sr., the chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus, authored a nearly identical bill, AB 1691. Jones-Sawyer’s bill faced strong opposition from the state’s tribal groups, which saw it as encroaching on their turf.

“When you go from a 90-10 split to a 50-50 split, you’re moving away from charity to something more like a lottery,” David Quintana, a lobbyist for the California Tribal Business Alliance told the Los Angeles Times last year. “This is a huge change.”

Questionable spending by sports charities

In addition to benefiting nonprofits managed by state lawmakers, CalWatchdog.com’s review of California-based sports franchises found that their charitable entities frequently spend money on questionable activities that often benefit the underlying pro sports business.

According to the group’s tax return, the San Diego Chargers Charities spent nearly $40,000 to run its “Junior Charger Girls” program. The group’s noble charitable function: to teach girls aged seven to fifteen “the performance routine from the official Charger Girls Dance Team.” The nonprofit also spent $5,891 on football tickets.

In some cases, the sports nonprofits lose money on lavish fundraising events. The Los Angeles Lakers Youth Foundation spent $100,000 to a rent a golf course for a fundraiser that lost money, according to the nonprofit’s most recent tax return.

The Oakland Athletics Community Fund spent thousands of dollars on promotional-type events and fundraisers, including $65,525 for a golf tournament, $53,611 for a “bowling bash” and $9,654 for player appearances, according to the organization’s most recent tax return. That doesn’t include the $98,774 spent on “grants” to the Athletics Investment Group, LLC, the company that owns and operates the Oakland Athletics. The grants were for tickets to A’s home games, yet the organization did not acknowledge a relationship between the two entities in its tax filings.

Senate Bill 549: Sweetheart deal for sports nonprofits

A statewide coalition of charitable organizations says the legislation provides a special perk to a small group of nonprofits.

“SB 549 lets professional sports teams and their foundations play by different rules than the rest of us,” CalNonprofits, a statewide advocacy group that represents more than 10,000 nonprofit organizations, wrote in opposition to the bill. “All other nonprofits – school bands, symphonies, humane societies, rotary clubs and food banks, and all the rest of us – would be limited to the current 90/10 rules, whether they prefer it or not. And that’s not fair.”

Because the bill amends a voter-approved initiative, it requires a two-thirds vote of both houses — giving Republican lawmakers rare power to influence public policy. The Republican Caucus’ analysis of the bill has raised concerns about the bill, especially its proposal to add a new $5,000 fee.

“There is a fee contained within this bill,” a Republican staff analysis of the bill warns lawmakers. “The bill requires eligible sports franchises, manufacturers and/or distributors of raffle related products and/or services to pay a $5,000 annual fee, in addition to a $100 fee for every individual raffle conducted at an eligible location to the DOJ in order to cover the administrative and enforcement provisions of the bill.”

Not a single lawmaker — Republican or Democrat — has voted against the bill.

A school district in New York has banned footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls or any dangerous instrument that might hurt someone on school grounds.

“Port Washington schools Superintendent Kathleen Maloney said the change in policy is warranted due to a rash of playground injuries,” CBS New York reported. “Some of these injuries can unintentionally become very serious, so we want to make sure our children have fun, but are also protected,” Maloney said.

So the school officials deferred to the lawyers, who apparently advocate keeping children safely indoors all day where they can’t get hurt. Blunt-nose scissors and jars of edible paste are not going to hurt anyone.

During recess at Port Washington schools, “[F]ootball is out and Nerf ball is in. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.”

In Sacramento where I live, the Sacramento City Unified School District's motto is: “Putting children first.” On the district website, not one elementary school had pictures of playground equipment or mention of athletic activities.

One school mentioned its “fitness program,” which  included doing “short stretches every morning and one activity per day,”  the school website reported. How very civilized.

The school taught jazzercise, had a healthy snack preparation demonstration, “a visit by Sacramento United Soccer League representatives to teach students about fitness and agility, and a visit by local firefighters who talked to students about the importance of physical and mental fitness.”

Presentations, talks, demonstrations … and jazzercise. How fun. But that's putting teachers first.

Rough and tumble playground

I was a total rough and tumble kid. Soccer wasn’t exciting enough, so my friends and I played tackle soccer. We climbed trees and shot beebee guns at each other. We strapped firecrackers to Barbie dolls, and well, you know.  Today, I’d be arrested and so would my parents.

On the playground at school, we played dodge ball, where you actually were supposed to hit someone with a ball to tag them “out.” Dodge ball is gone. We played crack-the-whip, where kids form a human chain and whip the kid on the end around until she goes careening off and falls. And we did cartwheels. I still have the scars on my always-scabbed knees to remind me what fun recess time was.

We ran races, where someone won and someone lost. Losing is no longer acceptable at government schools. Yet learning how to lose is as important as learning how to win.

And I got in fights but wasn't suspended.

The playground is a place where children establish social order.

The school playground back in the  1950s, 1960s and 1970s was chaos, where kids were allowed to run and play like wild animals. But it was controlled chaos, managed by the social order, and loosely overseen by the adults, who stepped in only when it got too rough.

Football is deadly

There has been a movement for two decades to ban school recess, along with school sports.

Journalist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell has compared professional football to dog fighting. “In what way is dog fighting any different from football on a certain level, right?” Gladwell said in a Forbes magazine story. “I mean you take a young, vulnerable dog who was made vulnerable because of his allegiance to the owner and you ask him to engage in serious sustained physical combat with another dog under the control of another owner, right?”

“'Well, what's football?” Gladwell asked. “We take young boys, essentially, and we have them repeatedly, over the course of the season, smash each other in the head, with known neurological consequences. And why do they do that? Out of an allegiance to their owners and their coaches and a feeling they’re participating in some grand American spectacle.”

And now four professional football players are suing the NFL over concussion injuries — as if they didn’t know football was a contact sport, and were paid millions of dollars to do it.

“What does this mean for football in America?” asked Brian E. Moore, MD, on kevinMD.com. “Nothing. Fans are willing to spend a lot of money to see men slam into each other’s heads on the field. But, as a parent, you can do something. You can forbid your son from playing football.”

Humans are animals too

To use another dog analogy, the playground is like watching dogs play. Dogs run like a pack, bumping, jumping over each other, play-biting and dominating, or allowing other dogs to dominate. Kids do this too, when allowed. The playground was the place we once learned how to deal with confrontation, hurt, success, physical and emotional challenges, and to face our fears.

With today's emphasis on standardized testing and academic performance, recess and sports have been sacrificed in many schools. In 1998, Benjamin O. Canada, the superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, famously told the New York Times, “We are intent on improving academic performance. You don’t do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars.”

A doctor disagrees with this dangerous trend. Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant professor and pediatrician, conducted the “School Recess and Group Classroom Behavior” study in 2009, when the trend to cut recess and sports was growing. “We need to understand that kids need a break,’’ Barros said. “Our brains can concentrate and pay attention for 45 to 60 minutes, and in kids it’s even less. For them to be able to acquire all the academic skills we want them to learn, they need a break to go out and release the energy and play and be social.’’

The playground at school today is calm and organized, where everyone is a winner. And many of the kids are taking Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses. But teachers are happy. And school district lawyers can rest easy.

Let the kids play virtual sports.

By Katy Grimes

Is it any surprise that sports, weather and traffic now account for 40 percent of the content on television newscasts? “In 2012, a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public,” reports a new study from the Pew Research Center’s project for excellence in journalism.

Most interesting however, is who is leaving news outlets: “People who said they had forsaken a news outlet were more likely to be men than women, older than younger, richer than poorer and Republican or independent rather than Democratic. While about one-third of Republicans and independents stopped turning to a news outlet, just one-quarter of Democrats did,” the report found.

“The primary concern for people who gave up on an outlet seems to be quality,” the report found.

Surprise, surprise.

“When asked which they noticed more, fewer stories or less complete stories, far more people said the latter (24 percent to 61 percent). While reduced thoroughness in stories was the more prevalent response among adults overall who were aware of the struggles, the split was not nearly as wide – 48 percent versus 31 percent.”

The report found that thoroughness in the stories was the biggest problem. People want complete stories and are fed up with media not asking questions.” 61 percent of them said stories were less complete than they had been versus just 24 percent who complained there were too few stories,” the study found.

This is what I rail on constantly. Too many members of the dwindling media are skilled stenographers, and don’t bother to ask “who, what, when, where, why, and how?” The questions not asked are apparently what has so many Americans leaving news broadcasts in search of thorough content.

Take a look at the report – share your thoughts.

The State of the News Media 2013