Redlands City Council postpones decision on Airfest fee waiver, alcohol permit

REDLANDS>> The City Council has agreed to postpone their consideration of a fee waiver for Hangar 24 Charities to their meeting on May 6.

Mayor Pete Aguilar requested they postpone the decision to allow city staff and the non-profit, which was formed by Hangar 24 brewery to support agriculture, to discuss the possibility of sharing the $70,666.80 in fees. They also postponed their consideration of allowing alcohol sales during the 2014 Airfest on May 16 and 17.

“After some discussion with representatives from Hangar 24 Charities we would like to push this item to our next May meeting in the interest of having the discussion about the fee waiver amount and whether there is the possibility to have the charity participate in some way for the fee waiver cost,” Aguilar said.

The Airport Advisory Board on April 2 voted to recommend the approval of the Airfest to the council, with a condition that the showline be set at 200 feet by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is still in process.

Several airport tenants spoke in opposition of the event during Tuesday’s council meeting.

Hangar 24 Charities expects a crowd of 25,000 people and to raise $525,000 from the event, according to a city staff report.

The fees the council will consider waiving include the costs to the city to provide police and fire personnel, street sweeping, parking lot preparation, barricade rental and a show mobile rental deposit, according to the staff report.

Several meetings were held with the event organizers and the Airport Advisory Board, which was attended by tenants and business owners at the airport.

Several voiced their concerns about the potential impact the show could have on them.

Aguilar also suggested the council discuss their process of waiving fees, which is a discussion the council has had in the past, he said.

“We don’t want to pick on a charity but we do need to have some discussion on the size and the scope of the fee waiver before us and all fee waivers that come to us,” Aguilar said.

Councilman Bob Gardner agreed.

“As the council knows I’ve struggled with the whole fee waiver process since I’ve been on the council and I welcome serious discussion about how we might reform this process in favor of a more reasonable approach that benefits the taxpayer and the city interest,” Gardner said, adding that if the city was in a better financial condition then it wouldn’t be as difficult of a fee waiver to address.

“Ultimately the fee waiver, as I tried to state before, comes down to a trade off of funds the city has available for priority purposes,” he said. “When an amount gets larger that trade off becomes an even larger issue. If the city was in better financial status these would not be perhaps so difficult. We wouldn’t have as many difficult priorities going into the budget season for the next fiscal years. $70,000 is a large amount.”

Gardner also asked about the health of the Redlands Municipal Airport fund, which is in the black but owes $1 million to the solid waste fund, according to city staff.

“The airport while doing better, is not ultimately in the best financial shape as it could be,” he said.

Source:    http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com