Fund Superfest, but with conditions – Editorial

The city-parish has a rare opportunity to make a relatively modest investment ($300,000 a year) to help strengthen a young event that could become a regional home run for Baton Rouge.

Quint Davis’s Festival Productions, who also put on the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, have created a glittering Memorial Day weekend event for Baton Rouge in just two years. This year Bayou Country Superfest drew 75,000 people despite a furnace-like heat wave and sky-high fuel prices. Country music enthusiasts from all over America and beyond traveled to Baton Rouge and energized our usually sleepy holiday weekend.

Bayou Country Superfest is now the only non-football event to truly showcase and leverage Tiger Stadium during its idle months. And as much as any new event in recent memory, it’s helping to brand Baton Rouge nationally and sow positive perceptions about us. Just think of how many people are viewing the thousands of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube posts featuring these big-time country music names.

Country fans naturally support the armed services, so staging the event on Memorial Day weekend is a great fit and one that could draw attention to and honor the families of men and women who’ve given their lives for our country.

But as with most things in life, the trouble comes when we talk about the money.

Mayor Kip Holden committed more than $300,000 in tax dollars to the promoter. But now, amid what’s become constant political bickering, the Metro Council has yanked the expenditure from the mayor’s budget, and the event’s future funding is up in the air.

Metro Council members want to see more transparency from Davis and Festival Productions, who refuse to disclose key financial details. Davis insists the money is needed to help offset hefty up-front costs. Cutting off public funding to Superfest may be a legitimate threat to the event’s future, but coming clean about its finances is not.

But local officials should be able to resolve all of this. Why not tie the funding to the sales or net proceeds? If the promoter reaches a certain agreed-upon threshold, then he repays the city-parish. This kind of solution will require the parties to sit down and discuss the whole event in detail and in good faith.

The city-parish should itself be more open about who uses Tiger Stadium’s luxury boxes for the Superfest. They should address complaints that the boxes were used by public employees’ friends and family members. There should be a public accounting of how such perks are used, and we support using them in the way state officials have the Superdome: as an economic development tool. Officials should use coveted invitations strategically, offering them to business leaders who are considering investing in Baton Rouge or moving their businesses here, or even as a reward for companies that create or bring in a certain number of new jobs.

Most important, the mayor and the Metro Council must work together to pursue productive discussions with Festival Productions. They must not squander such a rare and inexpensive opportunity to build a signature event for our community.

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