Some fees don’t even make sense;
Renting the park does carry a fee, but it’s not particularly large. The tournament is charged a fee of $45 per field for the duration of a soccer tournament. There are 21 fields in Yankton Trail.
So the total rental fee is $945. The organizers also helped purchased the new soccer goals and with other park improvements, Juhnke said.
The vendors have to pay for permits, too.
The fees are marginal compared to the return in sales tax revenue and exposure the tournament brings in through thousands of visitors, Juhnke said.
Organizers expect the tournament to bring $17 million into the city.
I would agree, the $17 million dollar impact definately offsets whatever support the city provides. But in all fairness, do you think $945 even comes close to the cost to maintain and water these fields for a week? Not only that, but the overtime paid out to the SFPD and the traffic engineers to help control traffic. If I had to guess, I bet the city pays out between $20-40,000 extra to help with the tournament, then ironically lets the tournament organizers keep the parking fees. I can also bet their are some organizers that are making thousands of dollars from their efforts. It’s kind of hypocritical when you consider the mayor not wanting to give handouts to special interest groups, but I guess soccer (councilor Rex Rolfing) and tennis (Mayor Huether) are OK. No conflicts here, move along, nothing to see. Now lets worry about Stehly’s nine inch grass.
The bigger question is how can the organizers of this event know how much money it will bring into the city? I mean I thought that was impossible since the city can never seem to do it with the “Denny”.
Payment and accounting for the fees is overhead more than what’s collected. It’s common sense. Something the city is not known for.
Briggs, they don’t care. I know how these things work, peeps who organize these events make big money while the taxpayers subsidize them in the name of ‘the kids’ and ‘economic impact’. Somebody got very rich over the past week, and we will never know who it is.
I know they don’t care. I just thought it was borderline humous how they can bring out the numbers when they feel like it. If only more people would start demanding the information they don’t want to have released.
the other day when turdbeck was whining about sales tax revenue, he said the supposed 17 million would do nothing to offset the shortfall. so much for economic impact.
The SFPD does not pay its officers any overtime to work any event in the city usually. So I am going to take a stab at it and say the PD is not incurring any overtime on this event or any event this year.
Jon,
Okay, I’ll bite. Let’s say NO overtime was paid and NO extra officers were put on duty to cover the uptick in traffic. Let’s also say it was just another normal week in SF. So what do these officers normally do if they are not covering events like this? Hmmm.
So in turn, what you are saying is that they moving patrols to cover the event?
After see the $10 parking fee sign I was glad to see the AL run this story. Park renters should have to clearly post who benefits from the fee.
Tough to charge fairly for events like these as the peach festival and the soccer events have way different attendance numbers. Based on the amount of traffic in town, I would say tax revenue paid for the cities time.
So as a point of discussion, do you DL believe all special interest events in our city must be revenue neutral for the taxpayer?
You are a big proponent of publicly funded arts.
LJL, you missed my point from the beginning. I just think it is silly to charge even $1 to an event that brings in $17 million impact (a number that is debatable) But I do think the economic impact of the tournament does pay for all the city services. It reminds me of a few years ago when the city was going to pull traffic control from JazzFest because they said the staffing cost them around $7,000 extra, and JF argued the same point, the economic impact of visitors makes up for the $7,000.
I guess the point I was trying to make is the irony of it all. The mayor gets on his high horse about how he thinks kids shouldn’t swim for free or get free bus rides while he subsidizes the soccer tournament and his precious tennis hut to the benefit of those organizations. Once again, picking and choosing the winners.