By Joe Sambol
$300K to help festival recover from last year’s bad weather, poor turnout, writes Joe Sambol.
The City of Ottawa has given the Canadian Tulip Festival a little financial fertilizer in the hopes of reviving its wilted funds.
On Feb. 12 city council approved a one-time $300,000 line of credit for the festival to help recover after last year’s poor turnout.
Last year, cold weather crippled the nearly three week long celebration, and led to the cancellation of some events.
“We really are in a crisis situation,” says Doug Little, marketing and communications manager for the Tulip Festival. “We had a very bad year last year. The weather was about the worst the festival had in its 50 years. While we were on track to do very well with the festival, we just hit a wall of very bad weather.”
The festival’s situation was so severe, Kent Kirkpatrick, general manager for the City of Ottawa’s corporate services department, wrote in a report that without receiving the line of credit “it is very likely that the festival will be unable to operate.”
While Little says the festival may have gone on without the line of credit, it would not have met the standard set by previous years.
“Who knows, we might have been able to put a festival on without this help, but it would have been a pretty tough job and I don’t think it would be the kind of festival that local residents and tourists have come to expect of the Canadian Tulip Festival,” Little says.
Approving a line of credit for a festival is a rarity as funding is usually dealt with through grants.
Given that the festival annually brings in $30 million for Ottawa’s businesses and is the largest tulip festival in the world, as well as one of Canada’s oldest celebrations, council answered the festival’s cry for help.
“It’s not something that comes up very often but these are very exceptional circumstances based on something that is such a community interest. It’s only in those types of celebrations that are city-wide and have such a tradition (that this would happen),” says Coun. Herb Kreling, adding that the length of the festival also plays a significant factor.
“Sometimes we have these special ‘one-ofs’ we have to take a little bit of extra consideration for,” says Kreling, who also serves on the corporate services and economic development committee — the group that presented the item to council.
However, Michel Gauthier, executive director for the festival, made it clear that approaching council for help was a last resort.
“It is an emergency, and it’s hard for us because we have to face that,” Gauthier says. “We came to the point to say if we don’t get this, we’ll have to cease operations. The only reason we went to the city is because we are in a dire strait type of position.”
The road to achieving such a line of credit is long and arduous, and Karen Tippett, manager of financial planning for the City of Ottawa, says other local festivals should not view this financial agreement as a regular option.
“I think it was tough to get to this point, and other festivals should continue to rely on whatever our regular special events program is, and not rely on the city beyond that,” Tippett says.
The economic risk to the city is low because the money is expected to be paid back by this May.
But Little says “the city would be on the hook for it” if organizers couldn’t repay the outstanding balance.
This year’s Tulip Festival runs from May 1 to19, and will have an Australian theme called “Celebrating Tulips Down Under”.