Overhaul of city grant program will favor events with a regional pull

photo by: John Young

Mariel Reynolds, of Kansas City, Mo., hangs upside down, suspended above New Hampshire St. in front of the Lawrence Arts Center, as she performs with the aerial performance group Voler - Thieves of Flight while spectators watch as part of the annual Lawrence Busker Festival, Sunday, May 31, 2015.

The city grant program that helps support events such as the Old Fashioned Christmas Parade, the Free State Festival and the Busker Festival is getting a significant overhaul in how it awards funds.

Changes to Lawrence’s Transient Guest Tax Grant Program will mean an event’s regional appeal, economic impact and ability to become self-sustaining will be key considerations for whether it is awarded city funding.

“We definitely are looking for things that have a pull factor,” said City Commissioner Matthew Herbert, who also serves on the advisory board for the guest tax grant program.

The advisory board created a new rubric, which was approved by the commission this week. The rubric is meant to give more structure and consistency to the selection process, and awards points for characteristics such as overnight visits and overall economic benefit, as well as enhancement of “the cultural vibrancy” of Lawrence.

Megan Gilliland, the city liaison for the guest tax advisory board, presented the new rubric to commissioners at their meeting Tuesday. Another new consideration for the grant will be the event’s leverage, which is based on whether the event has other financial commitments and supporting resources.

“(The board) didn’t want this to be just a revolving loan account necessarily for events year after year after year,” Gilliland told commissioners. “They felt like the program should be used kind of as a starter, as something to help grow a program, and over time they should be able to hopefully sustain themselves.”

The advisory board is made up of community members and local hotel representatives and will use the rubric to make its recommendations to the City Commission regarding which events to fund. Though no event is ruled out, Herbert said that events will need to draw people from outside of Douglas County to be in line with the source of the grants.

“Events that are great for the community and bring community members out and everyone has a good time are terrific; however, the reality is the origin of this program — transient guest tax fund — is that it’s based off of money collected from our hotel industries,” Herbert said. “And so if the event does nothing to put people in hotels, it probably should not be funded out of a transient guest tax fund.”

Guest tax money comes from a special 6 percent sales tax charged on hotel rooms in Lawrence that is paid in addition to standard sales taxes. The tax was created in 1994, and its proceeds were designated for promoting tourism and the convention business in Lawrence. As part of its 2016 budget, the commission called for $150,000 in guest tax funds to create a formal grant program, which has since completed its first award cycle. The idea was that the grant program would be a structured way for the city to receive requests for support and draw on budgeted funds for specific events.

“Initially when we did this it was open to anybody. It was open to any event, anything at all,” Herbert said. “And we got a few applications that were programmatic — in other words, they weren’t a singular event.”

The upcoming grant cycle will be the first time a quantitative scoring system is used to make funding decisions. The biggest portion of points falls under economic development, with that category making up about 45 percent of the potential points. The rubric gives slightly less emphasis — about 36 percent — to a category for community and cultural development. Herbert told commissioners Tuesday that the rubric is both quantitative and qualitative.

“There are some events within our community, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, that simply enhance the quality of life within our community,” Herbert said. “And those are things we definitely want to keep going.”

In the past, the guest tax funds have been used to fund various local programs, including annual concerts, plays and exhibits put on by organizations such as the Lawrence Children’s Choir, Theatre Lawrence and the Watkins Museum of History.

The Lawrence Children’s Choir is one organization that has received guest tax funding for some of its bigger concerts. Jane Roesner Graves, director of the LCC, said she thought the rubric was a good addition to the selection process. She said she thought the emphasis on economic impact was an unfortunate reality in today’s world.

“It challenges us to bring in more hotel visitors,” Graves said. “Our current situation is such that families come from out of town, they stay for the weekend, they go out to eat several times, they buy flowers, they buy clothes to go the event, but perhaps stay at the residence of the their family that they’re visiting.”

But Graves added that the points provided for community and cultural development are important.

“We have a high economic benefit, but perhaps our hotel stays don’t show it,” Graves said. “However, in looking at the other areas of the rubric, I think that we more than make up for it in every other way.”

Commissioners unanimously approved the changes to the grant program Tuesday, and a 30-day window to apply for the guest tax grants will begin by Oct 5. The guest tax advisory board is scheduled to make its recommendations during its meeting Dec. 2, which will then be sent to the City Commission for approval.