An economic impact summary of Boonstock Music Festival offered some insight on the event as organizers look towards its future.
Barb Haynes said the summary helps Boonstock Productions Inc. guide its planning process, figure out who its current target market is and plan steps for changes and improvements for the event, held in Penticton over the August long weekend.
“Whenever you do an economic impact study like this, it helps you to plan for the future, in that, how else do we want to expand? What else can we provide and how else can we improve what we deliver?”
The survey received feedback from just over 2,500 respondents, who provided about 67,000 answers to 22 questions regarding the event.
The total expenses for the event were nearly $4.3 million with local expenditures of $2.1 million, including wages and salaries of $280,000. Economic impact to the Penticton region was $4.5 million.
According to the summary, a total of 8,621 people were at the event with about 7,300 (86 per cent) coming from outside Penticton.
The average length of time people stayed in the city was 4.7 nights with 64 per cent staying overnight at the festival campground; 11 per cent used commercial accommodations such as other campgrounds or RV sites, hotels and home or condominium rentals.
As for plans for Boonstock in 2015, Haynes said conversations are currently taking place with stakeholders, including the two locatee owners of land parcels on the Penticton Indian Band, where the festival was held.
Colin Kobza, president of Boonstock Productions, has four years remaining on a five-year lease with the locatee owners.
“We’re still wrapping up,” she said. “It takes awhile. Any major event like this, when you’ve got a budget of a few million dollars doesn’t just end overnight. There’s a lot of clean-up and there’s a lot of wrap-up to do and so we’re still there. For us, moving forward, we wouldn’t really be in hard planning and orchestrating things, moving forward until probably closer to mid-October before we’re really jumping on things.”
Meetings are still scheduled to take place with medical service personnel, RCMP and emergency responders.
“We want to sit down and have those conversations to talk about what happened, what we did well, what we can improve on,” said Haynes.
Final numbers on how the event fared financially are still being worked out by Kobza.
“We did very well on it,” Haynes said. “Certainly, without the liquor licence and the revenue from the liquor licence, it definitely caused some difficulty in realizing additional revenue, but I think in terms of targeting ticket sales, we were where we wanted to be.”
Haynes couldn’t say if everyone who worked at Boonstock had been paid for their services.
“I think just about every major vent like this, it takes awhile to clean this up,” she said. “Often it takes a couple of months to get it finished up and invoices in and entered into the system and paid out. I would say by the end of September he (Kobza) should have a fairly clear picture of where he’s at.”
Haynes said Kobza is proud of what was delivered and the lineup for the three-day festival.
“We had such a small team to orchestrate a very large event. We all worked extraordinarily hard to deliver it.”