Fest Hits Sour Notes

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Despite being one of the most successful street fairs around with a weekend of live music, rides and food, the Sunset Junction Street Festival has made enemies of local businesses.

The Silver Lake event, put on by the Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance, drew tens of thousands of festival goers Aug. 23-24, but store owners say it wreaked havoc on their business.

Several said the event’s boundaries minimized their participation, while others complained employees had trouble getting to work without a ticket even as they had added more employees to handle a surge of business that never came.

“Business was awful. We ended up doing worse than a normal weekend but paying out more,” said Sarah Dale, a co-owner of clothing boutique Pull My Daisy at 3908 Sunset Blvd. “I think there needs to be a lot more clarity with the street fair in general. I was trying to get an answer for a year, what’s going to happen in front of our store?”

The annual event took place around 3700-4300 Sunset Blvd. and 4000-4200 Santa Monica Blvd. For most of its 28 year history the festival has been free. However, in the last few years, organizers have begun charging an entrance fee, with proceeds going to a slew of local causes. This year, a single day ticket cost $20 at the gate, with children under 12 and those over 65 admitted free.

While several business owners said they support the spirit of the event, they said this year’s festival wasn’t planned or operated well. Several businesses, including Dale’s, are located east of Sanborn Avenue on a stretch of Sunset that was within the festival’s boundaries but didn’t have rides and attractions.

“It was a no-man’s-land,” said Joe Keeper, owner of Bar Keeper, a barware store at 3910 Sunset Blvd. He estimated the store did about 10 percent of its typical Saturday business during the first day of the festival.

Micheal McKinley, the Sunset Junction organizer and director of the non-profit Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance, said that he worked hard with the city and local businesses to craft boundaries to the event that met all groups’ desires.

He characterized the businesses that are unhappy as “a few people there who didn’t get strawberry ice cream as a kid and are still angry.”

McKinley added: “I feel we need to get respect. Next year will be our 29th year.”


A changing event

The annual event, intended to celebrate the area’s character, has a long tradition. But as the neighborhood has gentrified and boutiques and pricey restaurants have become commonplace, the festival has changed. After years of taking a donation for entrance, organizers began charging in 2006.

McKinley said that since last year’s festival, his organization began paying for all the city fees associated with street closures. He said the fair will net about $50,000 for a variety of community programs.

Still, the entrance fee issue has struck a chord. “I objected to the $20 entry fee because the mantra of the festival is celebrating the diversity of the neighborhood,” Keeper said. “$15 or 20 a person a day really pushes the working class folks out.”

It is unclear exactly how many people attended the festival and McKinley said he didn’t have attendance figures. Some accounts peg it at about 50,000 people for the entire weekend and others suggest it was twice that much.

“I don’t think as many people showed up as previous years because of the price,” said Tootie Maldonado, co-owner of the boutique ReForm School at 4014 Santa Monica Blvd. and a critic of the event.

Further ratcheting up the divisiveness is a contentious document that has circulated among local business owners.

The document, a city request for street closure signed Aug. 20 by McKinley, includes language that suggests the organizers were not allowed to charge an entrance fee. “Admission to an event may not be charged; and the public at large may not be denied access to any portion of any street except in cases of emergency,” the document reads.

McKinley said he signed the street closure document “under duress” because of a deadline and said that he has city documents that indicate the event was never meant to be free.

Julie Wong, a spokeswoman for City Councilmember Eric Garcetti, whose district includes the festival area, said the only intent of the document was to allow people that worked at businesses within the perimeter of the festival to get to work without paying the entrance fee. Wong did say that it had been clear that “the organizers were going to charge a mandatory fee,” which is why the organizers now pay for city services.

Still, the controversy has prompted Garcetti’s office to refer the matter to the City Attorney to determine whether the festival had the right to charge festival goers. “It is something that is being looked at by the City Attorney’s Office,” Wong said.

Frank Mateljan, a press deputy to City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, said the matter is being investigated only to clarify the issuance of permits.

“Our office plans to clear up any policy ambiguities or address any issues that may need clarification regarding the future issuing of permits,” said Frank Mateljan, press deputy for the City Attorney.


Gaining access

Still, business owners remain unhappy, and are especially sore about the difficulty their employees had getting to work. Employees were supposed to be issued wrist bands to pass through the gates, but several business owners said they didn’t get enough.

“Anything over a certain amount of people we were told we would have had to pay half price,” said Maldonado, who noted she wanted to have eight people work at her shop one day but only got five wrist bands. “We have loyal customers who weren’t able to come buy something. We had customers that called in and charged it over the phone and we brought it to the gate.”

In the end, Genelle Le Vin, the president of the Silver Lake Improvement Association, acknowledged that the event “didn’t happen like we thought it would.”

Her community group plans to hold a discussion of the event on Sept. 24. The group expects local businesses and the event organizers to attend. McKinley said he was unsure if he’d be there.

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