Mayor Lisa Brown waives higher costs to large event organizers in Spokane

Large events being held in Spokane this year will no longer be expected to pay significantly raised prices to the city to cover the costs of police, fire and other services, after Mayor Lisa Brown issued an executive order pausing the cost increase.

“Community events are the heartbeat of our city,” Brown wrote in a Wednesday press release. “But we’re seeing too many barriers that make hosting these events harder than it should be.”

Those costs to the city can peak in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for larger events, and the city currently only recovers around 12% of those costs through fees on event organizers capped well below costs, according to information provided by city officials Wednesday.

For most events, those costs to organizers were set to double this year. For instance, organizers of Hoopfest, which is by far the most costly for the city to staff, were going to jump from $45,000 to $90,000 this year. In 2023, the city spent $80,000 just to cover overtime costs for Spokane police officers working that event, who are incentivized in the most recent guild contract with double pay for overtime to work major events in the city.

Those significant overtime payments contributed to the police department’s inability to control its budget in past years, with council members in 2023 specifically considering higher compensation from large event organizers as a strategy to cover ballooning overtime costs to the city.

Other attempts to cover some of those costs have been the center of past local political debate. In 2023, then-Mayor Nadine Woodward recommended raiding the city’s Traffic Calming Fund, typically used on street infrastructure, in part to help cover the city’s costs for staffing these events.

The city code that would have implemented the higher compensation costs for 2025 also allows the mayor to waive those costs, which the administration pointed to Wednesday as giving it the authority to prevent those costs from rising this year.

Brown’s executive order freezes costs to organizers at their 2024 level, while pledging to find ways to cut down the city’s costs so the municipal budget doesn’t eat the entirety of the roughly $91,000 in lost revenue from keeping costs the same. City spokeswoman Erin Hut suggested this could entail standardizing parade routes, replacing some police monitoring traffic with concrete barriers or other temporary infrastructure, or other strategies.

Hut also described this move as an intermediary step while City Hall drafts longer term solutions and works out its cost saving measures. She added that it was necessary to make the change via executive order, rather than have the City Council legislate, because organizers for spring and summer events are already planning their budgets.

Councilman Michael Cathcart, who had fought to keep the compensation costs for the organizers of the small Hillyard Hi-Jinx Parade to $400, noted that some organizers can struggle to pay for the city’s costs.

“We also face the risk that organizations like Hoopfest, with a big economic impact, might move to a lower cost jurisdiction, which has been explored by them in the past,” Cathcart wrote in a text.

Shortly after the mayor’s announcement, the Spokane Lilac Festival Association praised the decision and noted their costs to operate the annual festival and parade had “risen at an unsustainable rate” in the last two decades. That organization would have had to pay the city $20,000, up from $10,000, if the price hike had been implemented.

“By pausing the increase in event fees, this will allow SLFA leadership to plan strategically for funding needs and coordinate with Spokane’s legacy events, which contribute to the local economy through hotel stays, sales tax, and support for jobs,” the association wrote in a news release.