Madawaska will cover more than $41,000 in unbudgeted expenses from a controversial music festival it put on last month, using funding from an economic development reserve account.
The town’s select board voted Tuesday night to allocate funding to cover the shortfall of the Northern Maine Summerfest, a single-day festival that brought a handful of relatively unknown artists to perform on a beach on Long Lake in late August.
The Select Board released a financial report earlier Tuesday that revealed the scope of the concert’s financial woes. The festival was budgeted to cost $75,000, money municipal officials said would be recouped through ticket sales and sponsorships. The event’s final price tag came at $90,000, and it generated less than $38,000 in revenue.
“There was a number, and it was exceeded, and that’s a problem,” Select Board Chair Renee Deschaine said during the meeting.
The board suspended town manager David Daigle earlier this month over his handling of the event’s funding.
The town still expects to receive $10,500 from event sponsorships, the Select Board said. Even with that money, Madawaska will have lost $41,812 to put on the festival.
The money the board allocated Tuesday to cover the deficit dates back at least eight years to revenue from a tax increment financing district that was never spent, Economic and Community Development Director Kristen Henry said during the meeting.
The move avoided taking money from the town’s undesignated fund, which would have required calling a special town meeting for the public to vote.
“Summerfest demonstrated that Madawaska is absolutely capable of hosting a large-scale regional event,” Henry said.
“There are definitely lessons that we’re going to take from this first-year initiative of this scale, including more conservative revenue assumptions, earlier sponsorship development, stronger financial checkpoints, and contingency planning,” Henry said later.
Around three dozen people attended the meeting, an overflow crowd that left some in the hallway outside the Madawaska Select Board chambers. Most of the crowd, along with several Select Board members, expressed that they enjoyed the concert, but not its expense.
“Don’t get me wrong, it was nice,” one resident said. “But holy crap, that’s a lot of money.”
The event was spearheaded by Daigle and Henry. It sold 805 tickets including paper and digital, and scanned 675 digital tickets at the gate. Paper tickets were not included in the admissions total, Henry said.
“It has a lot of potential and it did prove that we can do it,” board Vice Chair Jenney Dionne said. “There needs to be a committee. It needs to be more than two people. It just needs to be more planned and not thrown together in five months.”
