The Dane County Sheriff’s Office is investigating what’s being called an “enormous discrepancy” in the amount of money collected in the donor tubes at the Henry Vilas Zoo and what was reported publicly by its former nonprofit operator, the Henry Vilas Zoological Society.
County officials are worried that hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing. The Society’s president says the money’s been accounted for in its official financial documents.
Data obtained through an open records request to the Dane County executive’s office show the zoo reported collecting nearly $88,000 in the six metal tubes at popular animal exhibits at the height of the recession in 2011. Nearly the same amount was collected in 2015, before dropping by 25 percent in 2016 to $60,997 and another 25 percent in each of the last two years, $42,885 in 2017 and $41,125 in 2018.
The Society says that’s because it did not consider the money collected in the glass “greeter box” at each entry as part of the zoo’s donor tubes. The greeter boxes were introduced at the zoo in 2015.
This year, the county reports it’s collected $192,000 in the greeter boxes and donor tubes from January through the first two weeks of November.
“When the county took over collecting these donations this spring, we noticed a significant discrepancy between the amount of those donations and what the Zoological Society had reported to us for years as totals from their collections,” writes Josh Wescott, chief of staff to Dane County Executive Joe Parisi, in an email. “We hope law enforcement’s investigation helps explain the enormous discrepancy between what the Zoological Society reported in audits and the dollar amounts actually being donated by the community. What happened to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of past cash donations at the zoo is deeply concerning.”
The investigation, confirmed by Dane County’s Chief Deputy Jeff Hook, comes just months after the county and its former operator went through a public and acrimonious split fueled by accusations of poor financial decision-making on the part of Society officials.
The former responsibilities of the Zoological Society were spelled out in its final contract with the county, which ran from July 2013 through Dec. 31, 2018. The 10-page document called for the nonprofit to raise money for the “general benefit of the zoo” and to operate its day-to-day activities.
In anticipation of the new restaurant and concessions facility, the Glacier Grille, which was slated to open in 2015 and significantly increase revenue, the contract laid out specific payments from the Society to the county. The Society was required to collect the money from the donor tubes and concessions and pay the county roughly $750,000 or 80 to 90 percent of the net income each year.
The money in the donor tubes had always been collected by Society volunteers and the former zoo director kept monthly records as to how much had been raised. Ronda Schwetz did not continue that practice when she became director in June 2012, and there was no specific line item in the Society’s audited financial statements for donor tube income until those new contract provisions went into effect in calendar year 2015. Schwetz says she did not see the need to keep monthly records on donor tube donations when she became director because she “trusted the partners in place.” County officials say from 2012-2014 they regularly looked at the cumulative revenue amounts in the zoo’s annual audits including the concessions, the train, carousel and donor tubes and had no reason to question their accuracy.
The donor tubes do not appear as a line item on any of the Society’s audited financial statements from 2012 to 2014 and only show up again on the Society’s profit and loss documents when the new contract requirements began.
The new concessions facility led to an expected revenue boost and the zoo’s overall income went up almost half a million dollars to $1.75 million; that figure has stayed within $100,000 in each of the years since. The income from the zoo’s train and carousel has fluctuated between roughly $320,000 and $420,000 over the last four years, as reported by the Society.
Only the revenue from the donor tubes has been reported by the Society to have gone down each of the last four years and is now less than half of what it was when the new contract reporting kicked in.
Wescott says he first started to pay attention to the donor tube revenue in April, when the deputy zoo director and Charles Hicklin, the county’s chief financial officer, brought a duffel bag full of cash to his office. Later that month, the deputy director was back with $27,000 in small bills and coins collected in a single week.
Now, there are two county employees who empty the donor tubes, one of whom is a manager. The money is placed in a locked bag and brought to Hicklin’s office where it is counted in front of two people.
Alison Prange, who served as the Society’s president until this summer, did not respond to requests for comment. Her lawyer, Steve Hurley, says Prange “wishes she could answer questions about this but she can’t” because of a confidentiality agreement she signed with the Society when she left this summer.
The husband and wife team of Brent and Brenda Walter, who ran operations and visitor services, respectively, for the Society at the zoo, did not return multiple requests for comment.
Brent told Isthmus earlier this year that “All of the money we raise goes to the zoo. It’s been that way since 1914. Our mission statement is to support the zoo.”
The Society’s president, Tom Hanson, who used to serve as its treasurer, wrote in an email that the donor tube figures for the last few years only represented the money collected at the tubes located at the various animal exhibits throughout the zoo.
“Please note that those amounts do not include the donations from the glass ‘greeter boxes’ located at the two entrances to the Zoo (in 2018, greeter box donations alone were $144,569),” he wrote. “Perhaps the most likely explanation is that the county simply has a different system for classifying and reporting fundraising activities than the reporting system used by the Society over the years.”
But the reporting system used by the Society never includes the term “greeter box” and there’s no line item in any of its audited statements over the last three years. Donor tubes, however, are singled out as a revenue source along with concessions, the train, and the carousel. Hanson says the greeter box revenue is included in the overall “Contributions” section and notes the donor tube contributions were a “legacy fundraising activity,” which is why they were treated differently than those in the greeter boxes.
“If there is any suggestion that the Society was somehow withholding funding from Dane County, let’s put that to rest.” he wrote. “Every single dollar that passed through Society’s hands has been properly accounted for, audited and reported publicly.”
Wescott and Schwetz say the term “greeter box” is new to them even after multiple rounds of contract negotiations since 2013 with the Society. Further, the contract between the two entities specifically uses the words “donor tubes” to describe “visitor donation collectors… for the use of members of the public who wish to donate funds for the continued improvement of the zoo.”
“I have never once heard a distinction or even a suggestion that there are anything but ‘donor tubes’ at the zoo,” Wescott says.
My family and I are passionate patrons of the zoo, visiting upwards of 50 times per year when our three kids were toddlers and feeding the goats nearly every time. When I was a Channel 3 anchor, I emceed the Zoo Run fundraiser. On two separate Giving Tuesdays, the kids donated months’ worth of their allowance to the Zoological Society to provide food and care for the animals already here and help bring more to Madison.
In March 2018, we were given a behind-the-scenes tour. On that day, my kids decided to again bring their allowances and dumped it in the donor tubes.
The Zoological Society took the kids’ picture and posted it on its Facebook page with a caption that read, “It’s hard not to share when you see kids putting their allowance money into our donation box here at the zoo!”
This summer, the Wisconsin State Journal quoted Schwetz reporting a significant increase in the money it was collecting in those donor tubes. That piqued my interest and I filed open records requests with the county’s chief financial officer. I shared the numbers with Dane County Supv. Tim Kiefer, who last spring had opposed the dissolution of the relationship between the county and Zoological Society. During county board debate, he co-sponsored resolutions that would have required mediation and continued negotiations. Both failed.
Now, when provided data on donor tube collections, he expressed “concerns” and asked the sheriff’s office to investigate “what might be a case of ‘skimming’ the cash/coin donations, i.e. embezzlement,” he wrote in an email. “Of course, it is also entirely possible that there is an innocent explanation.”
As is standard protocol, the sheriff’s office won’t offer details on its investigation or speculate when it might be completed.
However, not everyone’s willing to wait for that investigation to be complete before passing judgment.
“When you have long-term partners, you assume you share the same vision and passion for taking care of our beloved animals and zoo,” says Schwetz. “Anything else is just not understandable.”
