Tag: Festival Steering Committee

Published Jan. 4, 2011 TWISler Breakdown: Sarasota County Festival Steering Committee This week your good buddy TWISler breaks down the colossal disaster known as the Sarasota County Festival Steering Committee. When it comes to debacles, this fiasco takes incompetence to a whole new level of blunder. (Oh, snap! Thesauruses can be so cruel!) Basically, the story goes like this: Once upon a time (August 2009) in a land far, far away (Sarasota County) a bunch of members from the art’s community thought real hard and decided that, rather than giving out a bunch of silly grants, they would instead use a one-time lump sum Tourist Development Tax Cultural Tourism allocation (Uh, kinda redundant?) to develop a cultural arts festival meant to coax traveling nomads and vagabonds, called “tourists,” into wanting to spend time in their land. The King (Board of County Commissioners) soon heard their cries (October 2009) and established a grand order of wise men (Festival Steering Committee) to envision a concept for the festival. The wise men were very wise and soon came up with the idea to use magic (Digital Arts Festival) to attract the nomads. The wise men then hired an oracle (Lords Cultural Development) to develop a business plan for their magic festival. But when the wise men returned to the art’s community to reveal their idea, the arts community didn’t like it. They didn’t like the idea one bit, and told the wise men to start all over. The wise men and the oracle were sad, but they wanted to please the arts community, so they tried to think of a better idea. They couldn’t. —The End (more…)

Published April 1, 2011 TWISler Update: Festival Steering Committee surrenders Some of you long-time TWISler fans may remember one of our first Breakdowns back in January in which we tore apart the one-and-a-half-year-long-and-running colossally disastrous fiasco known as the Sarasota County Festival Steering Committee. We wanted to give the committee a fighting chance to make its case before offering an Update on the issue. But with their recent ill-received business plan presentations to the Tourist Development Council and the Sarasota County Commission, that time has now come. And it doesn’t look pretty. The carnage began in mid-March when Committee Chair Robert Warren received a treacherous verbal beat-down from the 13 members of the TDC, who basically told Warren that the arts festival his committee had labored and toiled to develop for the past 16 months amounted to, as Obama would say, a turd sandwich. From claiming the committee had ignored major parts of its former-Canadian consultant’s report, which stated “The Festival of Firsts may help to retain or regain local audiences for the arts organizations but will do little in attracting new tourism to the area,” to pointing out the plan’s projected numbers appeared to be “plucked out of the air,” the TDC clearly stated it would not be picking up what Warren was laying down. Alas, a motion to give the committee one more month to clean up its mess was passed 11-2. (more…)