Uptown Live intends to capitalize on the crowds at the Hyack International Parade but eventually wants to march to its own beat.
Bart Slotman, a member of the Uptown Business Association, confirmed that this year’s Uptown Live event will be scheduled on the same day as the Hyack parade. The date of this year’s Uptown Live was questioned at the Feb. 17 council meeting, when city council approved $28,000 in cash and $20,000 in in-kind city services for the street festival.
“What we would like to do long-term is move it off parade day and make it a standalone event,” he later told The Record. “We are not sure whether the event is strong enough yet to do that. I think it needs a couple of years of building an audience.”
In past years, the Hyack Festival Association and the Uptown Business Association teamed up to offer Uptown Live, but the business association is planning this year’s event on its own. The two organizations have parted ways since Hyack fired executive director Douglas Smith last summer, a man many credit with revamping the association’s former uptown street fair into the new Uptown Live event.
Coun. Betty McIntosh told council Monday night that the Hyack Festival Association is planning to put on the uptown street fair following the parade, as it had done for many years prior to the introduction of Uptown Live.
“The interesting part is that Hyack has not communicated with anybody about any event uptown. And I would doubt the uptown business association is interested in a small-scale, amateurish type thing that Hyack has done in the past. We are interested in doing bigger scale professional events,” Slotman told The Record. “We would not be interested in working with Hyack and going back to what they call the street fair, which was pretty amateurish, pretty small scale. That’s not what we want to do.”
Instead, the Uptown Business Association plans to carry on on its own with Uptown Live, an event that would begin after the Hyack parade concludes.
“We have said that Uptown Live needs to establish itself, needs to be strong and eventually, once it has that name recognition, we would want to move it to a second day, to have it as its own standalone event,” Slotman said. “If we do it on the same day, obviously we capitalize on the audience that is already there. That is the benefit. Once the event is strong enough we would want to move it to its own day, which has always been the plan. When that happens, who knows? From a business perspective, obviously we would prefer two separate events because you are drawing crowds to the area twice instead of once. There’s definitely an economic reason to move it to its own separate event day, but it needs to be strong enough and have name recognition before we can do that.”
With council approving funding for Uptown Live on Feb. 17, Slotman said it’s time to get to work planning the event.
“We better get going,” he said when informed by The Record the grant had been approved. “We have been keeping in touch with the major sponsors. That’s a big piece of it – to have the funding in place to be able to pull it off.”
During the ongoing saga that’s surrounded the Hyack Festival Association in recent months, Slotman has been among those voicing support for Smith’s work with the association.
“We will have to see where it goes,” Slotman said when asked if the association would hire Smith to oversee Uptown Live. “We have already been researching event organizers, and we will need to be in touch with those folks pretty quick. Obviously, the bigger piece of the puzzle is the funding part of it. That’s the piece we’ve got for the most part under control. If the city has agreed to proceed with the grant, that’s great. We can put this thing back on track.”
A recent media report indicated that the festival’s budget is $87,000, with licensing fees and MCs to cost $16,500, event production to costs $30,150 and event management to cost $18,000 – including $10,000 to Alliance West Sport and Entertainment, a company run by Smith.
Slotman said the numbers were contained in a grant application from 2013, which contained outdated information.
“At this stage, we do not know who will manage Uptown Live. That may be Douglas Smith, it may not. And the actual dollar values will be as they may be negotiated with the successful bidder on the event management contract,” he told The Record Feb. 24. “All of the below dollar values are per the October 2013 grant application, and are only budget numbers.”
A recent editorial piece in The Record questioned whether it’s wise of the city to spend 28,000 and $20,000 on in-kind services for a one-day festival.
“If you want to put on a first-class, professional event, that scale of event has a certain budget associated with it. You cannot put an event like Uptown Live without the corresponding budget,” he said. “The other piece of the puzzle here is last year, $65,000 was raised from corporate sponsors going into the event. So the city’s investment in the event is on more than a two-to-one ratio and is maxed by corporate sponsorships. The $28,000 is a significant investment by the city, but there’s more than twice as much going to be put in by the corporate sponsorship committee.”
Slotman believes the funding contributions need to be kept in perspective.
“Yes the 28,000 is a significant number, but more than twice of that is put in by the corporate community. You can’t look at that number in isolation,” he said. “It draws a significant crowd to the uptown area, creating economic development opportunities, creating opportunities for corporation to connect with their customers, creating a focal point and increasing awareness of the uptown to much more of a regional clientele. This is significant benefit to the uptown area in making it a much stronger and well-known retail destination.”
