I have been researching the Trail of Lights Foundation and PARD's "event oversight" of the Trail of Lights Event.
My audit request — 82 pages — is case #3727 with the City of Austin Auditor. PARD Interim Director Means has a hardcopy. City Manager Broadnax met with me last week to discuss my research and concerns.
The current TOL website shows that the Organizer continues to violate their Legacy Contract Terms.
Let me be clear: The City grants fee waivers for this event based on the premise that the event is operated as a nonprofit and provides affordable admissions for the public.
By contrast, in the past 4 years alone, the Event earned over $1.4M in profit — after all expenses and salaries were paid. PARD’s former Dir. McNeeley may be personally responsible for over $100K of nonrefundable park-use fees that were not collected in a pre-Event deposit prior to 2023.
In 2024, the Organizer again charges $8 plus a $2.19 handling fee for general admission, rather than the maximum allowed: $5 per person. The Event — by contract — is to admit all visitors free of charge on half of the nights. The contract provides not for “some people admitted free” but “all people admitted free” on half the nights. Instead, VIP and ZIP admissions are sold on all of the FREE nights. ZIP admissions allow people to “skip to the head of the line” damaging social equity. Not all children ages 11 and under are admitted free.
I could go on. These contract violations — with direct support from PARD — are only the tip of the iceberg.
PARD collaborates by producing a Ticket Manifest that fails to report the number of tickets sold at each price-point. I doubt that this Ticket Manifest was produced by the ticketing company on record. In this way, PARD can say that they don’t have a record of the admission prices; it certainly is insufficient data to calculate the Tiered Special Event Maintenance Fee that should have been billed to the Organizer while the Event was not a City Co-sponsored Event, prior to 2023.
In 2023, Council approved a resolution that not only damaged the potential profit of the event, but baked the Legacy contract violations into the event for the next 10 years. I doubt that Council asked to know the annual profit and cash reserves of the Organizer.
What can the Parks Board do? Recommend changes to the operations of the event to protect the promises made to the public in the Legacy Terms. If the Contract with Legacy Terms must be violated, consider recommending that the Event receive a new contract and become a drive-thru only event in future years. I have data to support that.
Thank you for your interest. More details are below.
--dp
10-28-2024
