Glens Falls Mayor calls budget for his $100,000 Oc Tax grant ‘a start’; says he ‘made up’ numbers

By Cathy DeDe, Chronicle Managing Editor

The financial spreadsheet that Mayor Bill Collins presented to the Warren County Occupancy Tax Committee in support of his request for a $100,000 grant in 2025 is more of “a working document,” he tells The Chronicle.

The total expenditure is just shy of $226,000 on the document the Mayor headlined “Glens Falls Business Improvement District Event Growth Budget.”

The Oc Tax committee approved it last month and the County Board of Supervisors will vote on it at their next meeting on Friday, Dec. 20.

However, Mayor Collins tells The Chronicle, “I wouldn’t start with this document, because we made this document up.

“This was created by me in a quick minute in one afternoon, so we could give specific examples for the County Bed Tax Committee to consider.

“What we’ve got is an agreement that Glens Falls and Warren County should move together to build on the economic development of these events.”

“I made it up based on what I knew that they fund and what they don’t fund, and that’s all that this was.”

“What I see this is about is not a guide, a document to be scared of, but a document to build an ambition towards,” the Mayor told The Chronicle last week.

“It’s not like I got $100,000 and I’ve got to decide how to spend it.”

It’s a reimbursable grant, he notes.

The City or presenting organizations can only receive the funds if they spend the money on an approved use.

He said he’d be working closely with County Tourism Director Heather Bagshaw to be sure to stay within the rules.

Mayor Collins added, “I picked events that were successful in their own right, but that had easily low-hanging fruit for growth. And I said to them, are you interested? And they said yes.

“They all had reservations. They don’t want to lose their most successful fund-raiser. And I said, No problem. We don’t intend to run any of these events, or any of the other 70 events that happen in the City every year.”

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The budget as presented by Mayor Collins and approved by the County Oc Tax committee includes:

• $34,000 for the annual two-day LARAC June Arts Festival
• $29,000 for the Glens Falls Brewfest one-day fund-raiser organized by the Feeder Canal Alliance
• $34,000 for the Adirondack Holiday Festival (formerly Glens Falls Hometown Holiday), multi-day event organized by the Glens Falls Collaborative
• $34,000 for the Glens Falls Kiwanis Club’s Taste of the North Country that has been defunct since 2020, when it closed for the Covid pandemic
• $49,000 for a new event to be called The Great Hudson Music Festival
• $30,000 for a volunteer management Website to be supplied by Volgistics, a database-website-software developer based in Michigan
• $15,725 for unexpected costs

The budget for each of the four events breaks down into “Production and Staging,” “Advertising” and “Planning and Promotion Consultant” — with projected contributions divided evenly between Occupancy Tax and the Business Improvement District-City of Glens Falls.

The budget also anticipates $5,000 for each event solely from the City of Glens Falls DPW, Fire and Police Departments.

“We have money in our tourism budget, our recreation budget, in DPW,” Mayor Collins said, of City contribution.

“We’ll pull it from wherever we need to. We may not pull it all. We may not need it all. We don’t know what our end will be.”

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Reactions to the Mayor’s plan were polite but mixed. Several of the entities cited did not know in advance the specifics of how they’d be represented on the document Mayor Collins presented.

BID President Dan Burke tells The Chronicle, “It was a surprise to us to see that chart for the first time,” at the Oc Tax Committee meeting.

Mr. Burke says, “The Mayor did come to the BID and said he wanted to make events a little bigger and better. We said, That’s a great idea. We’d be happy to help you with that, whatever that means, but there was no more detail at that point.”

He and BID Treasurer Jeff Mead say the BID does not have additional funds to support events.

Brian Murphy, Board President and acting director of the Feeder Canal Alliance, said he, too, was surprised to learn their Brewfest was on the Oc Tax agenda.

Afterwards, the Alliance submitted a letter to the Oc Tax Committee protesting the funding. However, Mr. Murphy says that since talking with the Mayor, “it was a miscommunication” by both parties. After talking with Mayor Collins, on Tuesday he sent a second letter retracting the first.

LARAC Executive Director Phil Casabona said, “I do think that the city wanting to support some of the bigger events could be a positive. We’re here to support the community and the artists, and then the next thing in line is supporting all of Glens Falls. The benefit to what he’s trying to do with some of these events, especially ours, is to bring more people from farther and wider, and grow the event in a way the infrastructure of Glens Falls can handle.”

Jerrod Ogden, President of the Glens Falls Kiwanis Club, said he’d spoken in general terms with the Mayor regarding reviving Taste of the North Country.

“We’d love to,” Mr. Ogden said, especially as Kiwanis celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025.

But Mr. Ogden also warned, the challenges to bring Taste back are many, from restaurant staffing and other costs to finding volunteers, and increasingly costly Department of Health regulations.

Nancy Turner, President of the Glens Falls Collaborative and also Glens Falls Ward 3 Supervisor on the County Board, said the Collaborative was aware that the Mayor was proposing to expand the Holiday celebration in 2025. But she says, “I don’t believe we would accept any funding next year from the City,” for this purpose, in part because she worries it will impact their own Oc Tax funding.

Ms. Turner said, “I am also alarmed regarding the consultant line fee that is listed for each event. The Glens Falls Collaborative has produced hundreds of events in the last 10 years. We do not see the need to pay for a consultant.”

Promotions consultant for each

Added up, $85,000 of the total budget the Mayor presented to the County is earmarked for a Planning-Promotion Consultant, in increments from $10,000 to $30,000 per event.

At least since his State of the City address last January, Mayor Collins has advocated for a new City staff member to oversee and grow events.

As recently as this fall, the Common Council rejected a budget item for 2025 to create such a position.

However, “This isn’t about the city hiring somebody,” the Mayor insists. “I won’t be doing that. I’m calling it a consultant so that nobody confuses it with me hiring somebody. I wanted to make sure that nobody thinks that I’m hiring a guy who’s going to help grow events.”

Paul Ghenoiu, City Communications Director, tells The Chronicle, “A lot of this came out of the discussions we had with the event owners. When we talked about expanding things, a lot of them said…we’d like to do it, but we don’t have the institutional capability….We’re all just volunteers.”

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