GOVERNMENT
Face the music How the city spent — and will spend — your money on music fests
BY JUSTIN GRIFFIN
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eliminate, the festival’s burden on Maricopa taxpayers through a hotel tax. However, none of those ideas mean much unless these transparency issues are repaired. With the return of the Wild West Music Fest imminent this fall, hopefully, there’s light at the end of the tunnel and viability will improve for its second iteration. And maybe that light is an oncoming train. Only time will tell. ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it’ It’s important to examine, to the extent we can, how the city spent $370,000 of taxpayer money, along with hundreds of thousands of additional dollars in paying city staff to help plan and produce an event that already had a producer. According to the contract signed in July, the city and SLE would split the profits 50-50 after the expenses for the event were covered. Alas, there were no such profits to share. The event’s overall expenses exceeded $1 million, and the event finished with a deficit of $251,449.
SLE is a private company and is not required to respond to such requests. The partnership between the two sets up a “Who’s on First?” routine where both sides can point at one another with neither having to give up the requested information. For example, the contract between SLE and the city stipulated SLE would provide the city with weekly progress reports that included ticket sales, marketing efforts and sponsorship and vendor reports. FOIA requests reveal there is no record of those contractually agreed progress reports. This means one of two things. The city never enforced this part of the contract, or the reports were given verbally to avoid the inconvenience of a written record of facts neither side wanted to become public. Take your pick — avoiding transparency or incompetence. Spearheaded by the efforts of Chief Operating Officer Rick Horst, the city now has solid ideas to significantly lessen, if not
T TOOK NEARLY FOUR MONTHS for the city to learn it lost its entire taxpayer investment on the inaugural Wild West Music Fest,
held Oct. 13-15. After looking at the financials, it’s clear why the city and Steve Levine Entertainment, the event’s producer, wanted to wait so long to announce attendance figures and accounting — and did so in such an opaque manner. To gain a better understanding of how this opacity manifests itself, one must understand how Freedom of Information Act requests work. Only government entities are beholden to a FOIA request and only if it exists in their database.
InMaricopa.com | April 2024
April 2024 | InMaricopa.com
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