Bianca's Furry Friends - 2016 Update

Unlike the former Howard 101 show Back Office Radio, the blog is back from a hiatus with an update on the favorite charity project of Howard Stern and Beth Stern - the Bianca's Furry Friends addition to the North Shore Animal League ("NSAL") headquarters in Port Washington, New York, as well as information about the somewhat clandestine Bianca's Furry Friends Foundation, which appears to be separate from the NSAL.

History

Animal lovers have been waiting for years for this project to get started - it resembles the plot of an early Seinfeld episode in which Jerry, Elaine and George were waiting for a table in a Chinese Restaurant - each time they would ask the maitre d' about the status of their table, he would tell them that it would be ready in five or ten minutes.

Similarly, it seems like the NSAL and its spokesperson, Beth Stern, continue to tell folks that the 14,000 square foot addition (with an estimated cost of $7 million) will be breaking ground "next spring" or at some other time in the near future, but it never seems to get started.

Timeline Recap

For those who don't recall the exact timeline, here is a quick overview (see last year's post for more details):

May 2013 - initial announcement of the master plan for Bianca's Furry Friends

May 2014 - Beth and an NSAL executive state that Bianca's Furry Friends is expected to break ground "next spring" (i.e. spring 2015)

January 2015 - Beth announces that they are "3/4 of the way there", with no estimate of when it will get started (the NSAL financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2014 show that there were about $4.25 million of assets restricted for use to fund BFF):




Spring 2015 - estimated start date mentioned in 2014 passes without anything happening

Subsequent Developments

Since the blog post in March 2015, there have been a few more developments regarding Bianca's Furry Friends, none of which involve the commencement of any actual construction:

November 2015 - another year, another NSAL gala with proceeds going to Bianca's Furry Friends.  Beth dropped a couple of nuggets about BFF while promoting the gala, and told Newsday that they were trying to raise the "final $1 million" to get the project funded and said in another interview with HNGN that:

   ""Bianca's Furry Friends, yes, that's going to break ground right after the new year," Ostrosky Stern told HNGN."

As the gala was only a few months ago, no one knows how much money it raised.  However, the NSAL's Form 990 for 2014 indicated that the amount of 2014 gala proceeds (gross, not net of expenses) was around $356K - this was down, way down, from the $610K of proceeds from the 2013 gala (see last year's blog post for details); hopefully this trend, unlike the ratings slide during Howard's tenure on America's Got Talent, didn't continue for 2015.



December 2015 - Another Yoda Book

For the second straight year, Beth, along with illustrator Devin Crane and "contributor" K.A. Alistir, released another children's book about her purebred Persian cat and her share of the proceeds would again benefit Bianca's Furry Friends.  This year's installment was titled Yoda Gets a Buddy and as of this date, one website estimates its Amazon sales at less than 1,000 copies.  Beth's share of the proceeds from the Amazon sales may not even cover the cost of one of the animal activist's fancy leather purses let alone the somewhat expensive NSAL kitten play palace.

February 2016 - Kitten Bowl

For the third straight year Beth appeared on the Hallmark Channel's Kitten Bowl and she was trotting around to promote the event (unfortunately, ratings were a dismal 0.2, less than a third of the 0.7 rating of Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl and the Kitten Bowl finished well out of the top 100 cable shows of the day).

She also discussed the status of Bianca's Furry Friends in some interviews.

In a WebMD interview, Beth once again broke out her statement that she has no "human children" and said that they will break ground early this year:

""I don't have human children," she says, "so this is my purpose. .... Howard and I are working on a 14,000-square-foot expansion of North Shore's existing shelter, called Bianca's Furry Friends. The space will allow the cats to live cage-free until they're adopted. Friends have been so supportive -- Billy Joel donated over a million dollars, and Rachael Ray presented me with a $500,000 check on her show. We'll break ground early this year."

In a Newsday article, Beth said:

"We are over $7 million, and that means we are ready to break ground,” she said. “We are waiting, I believe, on one more permit and as soon as we get that permit we are ready to go. So I’m thinking that within the next couple of months we are breaking ground, and my dream will finally come true."

Based on that claim, it sounds like the NSAL must have received that "final $1 million" that Beth mentioned in the November 2015 interview with Newsday, although it sounds like the ground breaking date may now be pushed back to April 2016.

Beth also mentioned in another article that Bianca's Furry Friends is "15,000 square feet" (up from the original 14,000 square feet?) and that they're "just waiting on permits".

Separate Foundation

As mentioned before on this blog, Beth is affiliated with a separate charity called the Bianca's Furry Friends Foundation.

Information about this foundation is fairly scarce, as the foundation does not appear to have a website and has not filed its initial Form 990 with the IRS, but a number of documents are available for the public to view online on a database of charities maintained by the New York attorney general.

These filings reveal that:

  (1) the President of the foundation is one Beth Ostrosky Stern,

  (2) the foundation was formed in January 2014 and first began maintaining assets in New York in May 2014 (interesting that this was near the time of the Billy Joel concert when he donated proceeds from a show to Bianca's Furry Friends), and



  (3) the foundation received over $270,000 of contributions through December 31, 2014 and it received its first donation in May 2014 - a check for $250K; this is a nice chunk of change for a foundation which hasn't received much (if any) public discussion. 




It is a bit odd that Beth Stern has never specifically mentioned this separate foundation, which has now been in existence for over 2 years.  Many of the devoted followers of her Instagram account who enjoy the many pictures of cats she posts each day might pony up some money to fund this foundation.

Hopefully the assets held by the foundation may be used to help fund the NSAL addition (maybe to help with the filing costs for the permits that Beth mentioned in her recent interviews).  In the meantime, it is just one more unknown regarding Bianca's Furry Friends, in addition to the moving target date of when the NSAL addition will finally break ground.