2012年10月25日星期四

Common Council committee to review proposed special event policy

The changes are a second round of adjustments to the way the city deals with special events that began two years ago when former Mayor Carolyn Peterson, in anticipation of the city needing to reduce its workforce and tighten resources, tasked a team to evaluate and modify the special events process.

Initial changes were made for 2012, but a special events subcommittee of the City Administration Committee has continued to evaluate the policy in collaboration with event organizers and county tourism programs to propose additional changes for 2013. Some of the regulations from the 2012 policy (for example, the city will only approve one special event per calendar day) will remain the same with the new regulations aiming to encourage event organizers to use volunteers as much as possible for tasks like setting up no parking signs, picking up trash or blocking off the streets.

“The primary goal is to bring our special events in line with the services and support the city is reasonably able to provide,” said Alderperson Cynthia Brock, who served on the subcommittee.If you want to read about buy mosaic in a non superficial way that's the perfect book. “It will require increased organization and funding for managers who want to bring forward an event. Up until those points, those resources and funding have come through the city, and we are no longer in a position to ask departments who are already facing reduced.”

The new policy also requires that event organizers submit a volunteer management plan (showing how many, the scheduling etc.) as well as a resource mitigation plan that shows how the organizers will minimize use of city resources.

“This will favor special event organizations which are well established because they have a strong organizational structure,Find turquoise beads from a vast selection of Jewelry & Watches. like the Ithaca festival,” Brock said. “Events that do not have an organized management team will have a harder time under the structure because the structure demands the event be more organized.”

One of the largest pieces of the policy is the addition of a fee structure for use of city resources. The fees include rental fees for city parks and facilities as well as the fees for use of city resources and staff. For example, the baseline cost for use of city Department of Public Works labor and equipment in 2012 is $70 an hour, with overtime at 1.5. Based on that figure, the policy lays out that the cost for posting and removing street block of “no parking” would be $44 an hour, delivering and picking up barricades would be $35 an hour.The TagMaster Long Range hands free access System is truly built for any parking facility.

“Part of the change in thinking is to not only encourage organizers to take on more responsibility on their own through the use of volunteers, but also to consider the city’s resources almost as a vendor,” said Brock. “You can either volunteer to do the services or you can pay for the services if the services are deemed non-routine by the city. And that’s obviously a definition that’s open for speculation — what is a routine service and what is a non-routine service. First and foremost the city is going to make sure that we are going to be protective of public safety. If there’s a large gathering of people at any location and it’s deemed appropriate that there should be police personnel then there will be additional police personnel to ensure public safety. So it’s open to that discretion.”

Alderperson Chris Proulx,We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs. who served on the subcommittee as well, also pointed to the fee structure as a way to encourage greater use of volunteers.

“We looked first to find ways to encourage event organizers to use volunteers in many ways, such as posting no parking signs or manning traffic barricades,” he said. “The fees, in most cases, are designed to be the second option, when an organizer does not have sufficient volunteers and when the City must perform the function for public safety purposes. In the case of new fees for Stewart Park, we were already charging fees for the use of Cass Park, so we wanted consistency and we wanted to offset additional maintenance costs for events at Stewart Park.Purelink's real time location system protect healthcare workers in their daily practices and OMEGA interventions.”

The special events team, which is made up of city staff from the Clerk’s Office, Ithaca Fire Department, Ithaca Youth Bureau, Department of Public Works and Ithaca Police Department, evaluates the applications for special events and has the discretion to determine what would be non-routine for the city.

Brock pointed to the necessity of giving city staff some discretion in evaluating the applications because of the broad range of events that occur in Ithaca and how they could each differently affect city resources.

“One of the big challenges is that we have such a variety of events,” she said. “We have tiny little 5Ks or neighborhood walks all the way up to the Ithaca Festival, which could easily bring in 20,000 people. So how do you create a policy that encapsulates all of the conditions of how to give guidance of how these might be managed. This policy provides general guidelines and a great deal of discretion among staff to work within those guidelines. And I think because the guidelines are broad, it lends to a level of uncertainty for organizers who are not sure how it will impact their event specifically.”

没有评论:

发表评论