Alerus Center Bleeding Taxpayer Money!
In other words, Same-Old; Same-Old.
The city-owned events center has lost about $256,600 from the start of the year to the end of June. The budget said it should be ahead by $14,600.
Executive Director Steve Hyman said he expects to make up for the losses with events later in the year, though there’s also a game plan to cut costs if those events do not earn enough.
Nothing new here. The Alerus is losing money, but the management has their heads in the sand. The manager of the Alerus is claiming that if future events don’t make it up then they can cut expenses then.
Huh? These events are in the fall. Any expenses to be cut wouldn’t have time to make a difference on the bottom line. Not only that the fall is the busiest season for the Alerus. They should have been saving money through the winter, spring and summer when the calender is pretty sparse for the white elephant.
Right now Hyman’s got everything bet on the Britney Spears concert. The other events Hyman mentioned don’t sound to me like they’d make up the hundreds of thousands of losses incurred so far this year.
But if ticket sales for Britney were going well Hyman wouldn’t be stonewalling us on how the sales are actually going.
Hyman would not disclose how many of the 18,845 tickets have been sold, citing agreements with the promoters. But, he told the Alerus Center Commission meeting Wednesday that sales are very “encouraging.”
How in the world can the number of tickets sold in the city owned event center be confidential? After all if the Alerus loses money on the event it comes directly out of the city’s bank account. We have every right to know how our money is being risked.
And how confidential can the ticket sales be? Didn’t Hyman brag the first week of sales that all of the tickets up on the stage sold? If he can tell us that, he can tell us how much money we have at risk.
Personally I think the Britney concerts is going to be ANOTHER Waterloo for the city. But I don’t know the concert business. Maybe when the college students come back to town we’ll get a surge of ticket sales. But even if that happens it doesn’t excuse the Alerus Gang for betting a million dollars of our money in the concert industry.
We’re looking at another huge loss for the Alerus this year, It’s $270,000 behind budget for the first half of the year. The manager of the center is still telling us that he expects it to break even. When it doesn’t can we get a new manager that doesn’t look at the Grand Forks taxpayers as a cow to be milked?
