Members of Philadelphia City Council met Monday with organizers of several local parades to analyze how to cut costs for the events.
Franny Price, executive director of Philly Pride Presents, which stages the annual Pride parade, was not initially included in the meeting but attended anyway to prepare for any financial obstacles to this year’s event.
Shortly before last summer’s parade, the city notified Price that she would not receive the parade permit until she paid more than $20,000 for police and clean-up costs. The city previously didn’t charge parade organizers such fees but, amid 2008’s budget crisis, instituted the new policy.
Price agreed to augment last year’s parade route to cut down on the number of required officers, which resulted in the reduction of the fee to about $10,000.
She said she heard about this week’s meeting through the news media and contacted Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez, who was facilitating the meeting on behalf of the organizers of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Her staff told Price she was welcome to attend.
In addition to Quiñones-Sánchez, Councilmembers Bill Green, William Greenlee and Curtis Jones Jr. attended the meeting, which focused on the annual “ethnic” parades staged by the Irish, Italian, Polish, Puerto Rican, Greek and German communities.
Maura Kennedy, spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said the city hosts about 20 parades per year.
This week’s discussion resulted in the city’s agreement that it would not charge parade organizers for police who were already on duty and reassigned to patrol the parade routes.
According to the figures released at the briefing, the police and other city fees this year for the six ethnic parades are estimated to amount to nearly $112,000.
The St. Patrick’s Day Parade is the most expensive: The 2010 estimate stands at $34,179.05, up from last year’s figure of $30,524.24.
About half of last year’s charge went to pay 40 police officers assigned to the parade — the same number of officers the city initially said Pride needed, which Price said illustrates that the city didn’t fully evaluate its new policy before implementing it.
“How does a parade like the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which is the second-largest parade in the city, is about 20 times the size of Pride in terms of people in the parade and at least three or four times the length, have to pay $30,000 and we were asked to pay $21,000?” Price posed. “Even if our fee this year is the same as last year, which was about half of the original, it still doesn’t add up. The city should have had surveyors at all of the parades before they started this last year to determine what people actually need instead of just throwing numbers out there.”
Kennedy said there is no “standard formula” to determine the number of police required, but that the city evaluates such factors as the parade’s time, location, expected attendance and past policing needs.
Kennedy said parade organizers can make simple changes to their events to cut costs, citing last year’s Steuben Day Parade, a German-American festival held in the Northeast, as a success: The parade organizers reduced their fee after they shifted the event time up one hour so the start didn’t interfere with police-shift changes.
“We are trying to work more diligently with community and parade organizers to make sure the costs are low for these events because they are important parts of the city and we want to make sure that they can still go on,” Kennedy said.
Price said a representative of the Managing Director’s Office attended last year’s Pride parade to evaluate its policing and cleanup needs, and Price is planning to meet with the managing director in March to discuss the expected fee for this year.
“This can’t wait until last-minute like it did last year,” she said. “Communication is really important and working well with the Managing Director’s Office is also important, so that we don’t find out a few days before the parade that we owe all this money. We need to know this up front.”
Philly Pride Presents still owes the city about $5,000 for last year’s parade, according to Price. She said the organization will begin making payments toward that debt in March, once sponsorships for this year’s event begin to arrive. Pride organizers will meet in the coming months to evaluate possible fundraisers to defray the cost.
This year’s Pride parade is scheduled for June 13.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].