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10
Oct 2008
Cruisin' for a bruisin'?
Posted by Scott Spielman
at 11:55 AM | Comments (1)
Click image to enlarge
Don NIcholson said he did, in fact, print up 175,000 maps.The issues surrounding the Michigan Avenue Cruise sparked quite a bit of debate at the Wayne City Council meeting on Tuesday night.
The city, concerned with the potential for the event to grow into something difficult to control, wanted to put those controls in place so they offered up an amendment to the special events ordinance.
It’s still a work in progress and that’s a good thing, because as written the amendment was pretty vague.
I have other issues with it, too. City officials said it’s not designed to deal with the cruise, but with different types of ‘mobile’ events—yet amendment 860.05 is labeled Michigan Avenue Cruise. They say they want to work with the event promoter, Don Nicholson, yet it was on the agenda and he said he didn’t know about it until Tuesday. It stipulates that the applicant must pay up front for city services when there’s no way of knowing what those expenses will be. City Manager John Zech posed the question of whether taxpayers should subsidize the cruise, even though any city funding would come from the Downtown Development Authority.
It’s not unusual for municipalities to require event organizers to pay for city services along with other costs, like providing their own insurance. The City of Plymouth does it for everything from Art in the Park to the Chili Cook Off to the Fall Festival.
Given that this event is only a year old, though, this might be jumping the gun a little bit. I’ve never really bought into the figures that Nicholson threw out about the event—like the number of spectators it attracted, the number of maps printed up and all that—but he’s trying to bring something new and unique into the city, help out the businesses and promote the community. I’d rather see more proactive work on how to improve the event than see the poor guy immortalized in city code.
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