City Council Work Session

Stacey SommerfieldstaffAnd so these are third-party events that over time have become annual. There are eight of them. Five of them include road closures. So there are eight events, but only five fill those six slots for road closures. The Sweet Mile, which is, there are two road races on this list, the Sweet Mile and then further down you'll see the Turkey Trot. Those are both events where the supporting agency covers all the costs. So you'll see a $0 city expense there, and that does not mean that the city does not support them with labor, but those costs are reimbursed by the organization. And then of the remaining eight, we have the Asian Festival, the Ride of the Patriots, Fairfax Pride, Juneteenth celebration, the Labor Day car show, Fiesta Fairfax, and the turkey trot.

Catherine ReadOkay. One of the things I would like to discuss is the new events. So Pride, Juneteenth, and Fiesta Fairfax were things that we wanted to do because we had never celebrated Pride or Juneteenth or Hispanic Heritage Month. There is no overarching organization like the OTFBA with organizing the Asian Festival on May. The town of Vienna has Viva Vienna, which is a three-day festival that takes place and is run by the Vienna Rotary Club. It used to be a town event, and then the Vienna Rotary took it over because they make money organizing and running it. So they have booths, they have vendors, they pay the bill to the town, and then the money they make, they distribute it because they're a service club.

But they are the entity that, they don't do that anymore. I'm C. Kelly. They don't pay the town. They don't pay the town. Oh, so they just make the money. but they are the organizing event for Viva Vienna they took that over and so they are the organizer for things like to your point about new events there is no organization for Juneteenth Pride or Hispanic or the Fiesta Fairfax because Elizabeth and Estuardo Rodriguez got the vendors and sort of were the organizing people that got pulled back together with the help of your staff and Pride, the first one we did was with George Mason University and getting help from them. Juneteenth was Mount Calvary Baptist Church, but there is no organization like the Rotary Club of Vienna

that can be an organizer if we put a framework in place that says some organization has to go and find the sponsors and do the organization. So we have to ask ourselves as a community, things came along because we wanted to celebrate something specific that the city of Fairfax has never celebrated before but if we go to a framework and a guideline that says well we're going to have the structure and the organization is going to come and seek this but what if there is no organization then do we say that as a city well if no one comes forward then we just don't do pride and we just don't do Juneteenth and we just don't do Fiesta Fairfax Mr. Alexander.

there was another committee that helped in previous years too. There was a Juneteenth committee, I think.

Stacey SommerfieldstaffWe do still have the Juneteenth committee. For those three events, we do have a group of community members who assist with those events. They are not supported by an organization that would help them be able to raise funds. I do think there's a possibility where we develop a framework and we're able to look at groups revenue and develop a cost share model where we're going to, you know, based on the revenue that you're pulling in, the city is asking for this much cost recovery. So I think taking all of this information that you've given us, we can come back with a good framework for what that looks like that is manageable.