How do I explain this to my boss?

Lately, our stable has turned into a 'hillbilly haven' as our boss/barn owner puts it. She complains that she doesn't have any money to pay for hay, yet she just left for the Dominican Republic to stay for two weeks in her own vacation house. She thinks that buying 11 round bales to feed 30 horses will last 2 weeks. I laughed so hard when I heard this. We have absolutely NO square bales in the barn. She's been making us push in (by ourselves) a round bale in to the barn. And wants us to pull off hay to use as flakes.
She doesn't want to fix the fence that separates two gelding paddocks. The fence looks TERRIBLE. It's the PVC fencing, it used to have wire that ran along both sides, but that also broke. The horses have kicked out/pushed over/broke in half so many boards/posts that the horses are only one or two rails away from walking in and out of each others paddocks. Oh, but the BO doesn't have any money to fix it! -sarcasm- We don't even have any extra posts/rails or even nails to fix the fence our selves. I've come to the point to where I've gone out with duck tape (yes duck tape!), and have taped over broken/sharp rails and tried to taped back together the broken posts. Now the barn looks like a 'hillbilly haven'!
If I ever drove by this stable looking for a nice place to keep my horse, I would skip right over this place. I feel bad about talkin' bad about my own stable because the workers (me included) really do care for the horses and try our best to make as nice/safe as possible for the them. How the heck am I going to convince my boss to wake-up, and put some money into fixing the stable?

I don't know...... and I'm really sorry for your situation. All to often it takes a horse or worse a person to get hurt for some people to get it through their heads.

I sincerely hope this isn't the case and she'll come back from vacation with a better attitude and fix up the joint.

I hope so too.

I hope so too, and if not I would suggest look into other in other barns/ stables.

Do you think she may simply be burned out?

It's really hard to be a BM - BO is even worse. Horse people can be very difficult to deal with!

She's not burned out. She doesn't work at the stable, she only comes down from Chicago about once a week to ride her horse for an hour and then leaves. She has a trail riding business that doesn't pick up until summer time, but that's the manger's job to oversee that. She doesn't even remember some of her own horses. We buy the ones with think are fit for trails, and we take care of the foals/broodmares/extra horses/boarders/etc. Half the time she doesn't even know what's going on, even when we try to reason with her.
I think she's just trying to hold out until the trail riding season kicks in, but we still have a few months to go...

She will start to dish out money when she starts losing money. If I was a boarder there and saw this, i'd move my horses.

I thought you were a boarder not an employee, but if that doesn't change I would look for another barn or job of some kind.

I would just say "Hey look, I don't want to offend you but we need to start doing some repairs here. You are not going to have people coming in if you don't fix this plan up a bit..."

It was like this at my old place. Things leaked, there were sharp edges on fences, broken rails and stalls... we'd always ask her to fix things, and she always said "I'll have my husband do it tomorrow" but he never did. The last straw was when my mare came in one day with a huge cut on her forehead from a piece wire fencing that needed repair. I was so mad. It was a while before I was able to move my horses, but until I could, I did all my own repairs, and then started telling the BO about it, and how much it cost me to do. I even once told her I wanted it deducted from my board. However, she didn't get her act together, and I moved my horses to a barn we built this January.

It was so frustrating.

I'd try to explain things to her calmly, but if she doesn't understand, tell her you're going to make the repairs yourself, and as BO, she's responsible for paying the damage.

Fair's fair.