At the February 10 Mayor and Council meeting, we voted on an updated policy for events organized by private businesses, residents, and nonprofits that take place on public property and/or require City support. The policy sets rules for those events and establishes a method for calculating a fee to recoup some of the cost of public services that support them. The final policy ended up passing 4-0 (two councilmembers were absent from the vote), but before that was a long, contentious debate and several rounds of revisions.
The Mayor and City staff first stated their desire to adopt a new special event policy in October, and the first draft of their proposal was introduced at the December 9 meeting. Several business owners attended and voiced various concerns: that the proposed fees would be cost-prohibitive, that the change in policy created uncertainty, that there wouldn’t be opportunities for event organizers to discuss their needs with the City. The Council reached a rough consensus that we should encourage privately-organized events in Brunswick, but that City support to those events should not be an open-ended expense from the public funds.
The Dec. 9 meeting left several questions unresolved: how would fees be calculated, how much discretion would go into them, what communication channels would be established, and what would happen with the event applications waiting for approval while the policy was being sorted out. After the holidays, the City leadership agreed to put pending applications up for an approval vote at the January 27 meeting (an important concern for me, so that planning already underway could proceed with reasonable certainty) and held a meeting with business owners to discuss their concerns.
At the Jan. 27 meeting, again with input from businesses and nonprofits, we reached a consensus on the method of calculating fees: to use an hourly rate for City support ($50 per hour for each police officer or other City employee needed to support the event) but to cap the fee at a set dollar amount to provide event organizers some certainty in their planning. We then approved the one pending application with a modest fee so that planning for it could proceed without disruption.
What remained was to set the fee cap and settle other details of the policy. Multiple council members proposed revisions following the meeting. You can see the ones I sent together with Councilman Bonanno in the Feb. 10 agenda packet (pages 33-38).
One stipulation is that events that close streets must be free and open to the public.
The final draft that returned to the Council on Feb. 10 was, in my view, clear and reasonable. It defines precisely which events do and do not require City approval. It provides clear deadlines as well as specific opportunities for both the applicant and the City staff to obtain a meeting to discuss the event, and it requires businesses and residents affected by road closures to be notified at least two weeks in advance. It allows events that do not close roads and do not need City support (think a neighborhood picnic in a public park) to be approved at the staff level and not have to wait for a council meeting.
Then there’s the fee: a $25 application fee and a $50 per staff-hour rate for City support, which is to be calculated the same way for all event applications, regardless of who the applicant is. All of it is capped at a maximum of $1,000.
I measured these numbers against the original intent of encouraging privately-organized events in Brunswick while not letting them be a burden on the public funds, and thought of it this way: The $50 hourly rate is two-thirds of the actual cost of City staff support, meaning that the City is chipping in a third of the support cost for special events that fall under the $1,000 cap. City staff ran through some scenarios and calculated the fee that would apply to the largest type of special event that might realistically occur in Brunswick, an all-day shindig on Potomac Street. That scenario came out to nearly $2,000, which under this policy would be capped at half that amount ($1,000). In that case, the event organizer would be paying one-third of the support cost and the City would be chipping in two-thirds.
The $50 hourly rate is two-thirds of the actual cost of City staff support.
That seems right. Privately-organized events provide economic benefit to Brunswick and things to do for our residents (one stipulation of the policy is that events that close streets must be free and open to the public). Bigger events have a bigger impact (and if the impact is likely to be more disruptive than positive, the Council retains the discretion to deny an event application). A policy in which the City covers between one-third and two-thirds of the cost of public services required for an event, depending on the event’s size, is a policy that recognizes the value of those events while setting reasonable limits to the cost borne by the public to support them.
Of course, we’ll have to see how the policy works in practice. I’ll have an eye on how it is implemented. But I think that, after several rounds of deliberation and revisions, it is now set up for success.
You can read the first draft of the proposal here (pages 68-78).
You can watch the video of the initial deliberation at the Dec. 9 meeting (public comment beginning at 7:48, mayor’s comments and council discussion beginning at 29:55).
The second draft of the proposal and supporting documents are here (pages 3-27).
The video of the deliberation at the Jan. 27 meeting is here (public comment beginning at 13:00, council discussion of the policy beginning at 24:46, council discussion of the pending event application beginning at 1:51:20).
The final draft of the proposal and supporting documents are here (pages 14-51, with the policy itself on pages 15-20).
And the video of the discussion and vote at the Feb. 10 meeting is here (beginning at 20:13).
(FYI — I’m not going to record an audio version of this post because I said most of it already at the public meetings, which you can watch at the links above.)