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The Bay Area Renaissance Festival paid Largo $25,000 last year to use a park. Now the city wants $1 per visitor.
By ERIC STIRGUS
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 4, 2000
LARGO -- City commissioners, spurred by the support of several residents, on Tuesday night unanimously agreed to ask for higher fees from organizers of the Bay Area Renaissance Festival to hold the six-week event on city grounds.
Organizers paid the city $25,000 this year to use the approximately 30 acres just east of Central Park Drive for the event. For next year's event, the city will seek $1 per visitor. An estimated 70,000 patrons attended this year's festival.
"You are doing the right thing," resident Pat Aland told the commissioners. "The city of Largo has not been fairly compensated for the park for years and years and years."
First held in Largo in 1978, the festival is popular among most attendees and some non-profit groups that set up booths at the event, selling items to raise money for their organizations. Others complain about heavy traffic from its patrons, the lack of parking during the festival and the rowdy behavior of some festivalgoers.
Festival organizers said they were surprised by the proposed increase in fees to use the property.
In addition to the fee increase, Largo wants the festival to come up with a plan to remove all stage equipment from the grounds. There are now several items on the grounds, which city officials say prevent other groups from holding events on the property.
The city also wants the festival to come up with off-site parking and to pay for the time police officers work providing security at the event.
Resident Ross Herman said although these initiatives may force the festival to leave the city, he told commissioners he supported their objectives.
"It might get (the festival) to find another sucker to take advantage of," he said.
Commissioners also agreed Tuesday to demand that the Pinellas County School Board pay the entire cost of the highly successful in-school suspension programs at Largo High School and Largo Middle School.
The programs were created in 1998 as a way to keep suspended students out of trouble by having them stay on campus during their suspension. A teacher and a counselor run the programs, which originated locally at Clearwater High School.
The city has paid 50 percent of the salary for teachers who monitor the students at Largo High and at Largo Middle. But during discussions last month to provide the $40,000 for this school year, several commissioners wondered why the School Board does not pay the entire cost of the program.
"They run the public schools and they have the money," Mayor Bob Jackson said in an interview Tuesday.
But before Tuesday night's meeting, School Board Superintendent Howard Hinesley said in an interview that he could not recommend providing the complete cost for the teachers.
"If we do it for them, everyone else would ask us to do the same thing," he said.
Without money from the city, Largo High School principal Barbara Thornton said she may have to discontinue the program.
"We'd have a tough decision to make because the program is so beneficial," she said.