THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412160258
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Bill Reed
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
The City Council made what seems to be a solid business decision Tuesday, after much squirming and soul searching.
A majority of seven decided to turn over the city's $1.5 million-a-year-plus resort events operation to Cellar Door Productions, the nation's largest concert promotion company, which has its regional headquarters in Virginia Beach.
In making the decision, council members cut the city's ties with Virginia Beach Events Unlimited, a local non-profit organization that has handled the entertainment chores for the last 21 years in one organizational form or another. Wearing one hat, it has organized the popular fall Neptune Festival and, while wearing another, it organized major and minor summer events along the Oceanfront. Some of the biggies include the North American Fireworks Competition, the American Music Festival and the Virginia State Games.
Along the way the council also cut its ties to its past. After a tense four-hour hearing, the members sucked up their courage and said no to VBEU and some old familiar faces in the city's political, business and social arenas.
Among them was VBEU president and chief operating officer Nancy Creech, a former council member, a businesswoman and a force behind the annual Neptune Festival.
It was Creech who is generally credited with dreaming up the Neptune Festival format, organizing the army of volunteers to make it work and arm-twisting well-known business and political figures into contributing cash, clout and time to the oceanfront party.
She also became a lightning rod for criticism - some of it pretty scathing - from a segment of the city's resort business community, which felt she was too lavish in spending taxpayers' money on certain events and being overly concerned with a much too select crowd of socialites, merchants and politicos to the exclusion of the average Joe and Jane.
Further, these same critics charged that Creech and the VBEU board of directors who helped her oversee the various programs, had been much too nonchalant in accounting for their spending, particularly on the 1993 fireworks competition and the music festival last Labor Day weekend.
Cost overruns on both events were never fully explained and mandated quarterly or monthly financial reports to the city were invariably late or not submitted at all.
Questions raised by the press or individual council members about accountability were pooh-poohed as attempts to smear VBEU, sensationalize obvious bookkeeping snarls or to make political hay for the powerful resort innkeepers' association.
The fact of the matter is, VBEU, as City Hall insiders refer to it, was bankrolled by more than $1 million in city funds in its final year of operation. About $800,000 of that came from a special half-cent tax on hotel and motel room rentals.
This money is supposed to be spent on creating entertainment and sports programs that will attract more tourists to Virginia Beach.
For the most part VBEU accomplished that mission with flying colors. The main sticking point for critics was accountability.
And, it seems this issue finally was the one factor that weighed most heavily in transferring the city's events contract to Cellar Door Productions - at least for the next two years.
For one brief shining moment - to borrow a phrase from the musical ``Camelot'' - the council did what it was supposed to do:
Make a hard-nosed decision that - on the face of it - would benefit all of the citizens of Virginia Beach in the long run.
Only time will bear out that assumption. by CNB