Attendance: 5,586
Last years home opener attendance? 6,377
So… we spent $40k+ and lost 791 attendees.
FYI: Since we last mentioned this, Alabama A&M has removed their attendance figures off their site.
40k for Central State University to come to Huntsville?
Yep. What is a “game guarantee”?
Apparently it is a fee paid to get a school to travel and get their heads kicked in.
Lots of schools pay these…
Well, Nebraska paid South Dakota State close to $400,000 to come to Lincoln this past weekend, while Missouri paid McNeese State $310,000 to visit Columbia on September 11.
Did Lincoln, Nebraska or Columbia, Missouri pay for this?
Should the city of Huntsville be paying for this?
Other expenditures?
T-shirts? $3917.59
How did this bring people here?
Tents? $1129.14
How did this bring people here?
Here is something that could have…
Advertising.
And what do they spend? $1,700.
And $300 of that was “social media”? Which is free…
The City of Huntsville pays that $40,000 for this? They are really dumb to pay this. Really, really dumb. For real.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | Alabama A&M, Dale Jackson, Huntsville
“The City of Huntsville pays that $40,000 is really dumb if that pay this. Really, really dumb. For real.”
Let’s not forget one of my favorite subjects about how they CANCELLED the Big Spring Jam and removed any chance we might have had to recover any lost revenue. I am really glad to see One-Term_Tommy has this stuff under control. We have turned the city over to a bunch of idiots who are more interested in buying votes (or paying for them from last election) than actually increasing the revenue flow into Huntsville. If this is not true why would you cancel one of the biggest money making tourist attractions and then throw away $40K (that we know of). Our mayor and City Council are not as corrupt as the folks getting arrested this week but then again they are just practicing to get better. Wish I had the time and talent to see who made money off the old Coucil Court property. Our mayor is a real estate guru but I am sure that is just a coincidence. Who knows, maybe somebody will watch where the money goes, follow the money and it always finds the crooks
I am sure none of the folks on the Council of 100 are involved, all good upstanding folks who fund elections for a district where they don’t live. (you did not really think I was gonna give this up yet? 
(dang, did not get to say anything about the HHA Nazis)
I think you are mistaken about who puts on the BSJ. The City only rents the space. They had nothing to do with the fact that the heritage foundation didn’t want to continue with the BSJ. From wikipedia,,
“Unlike most other large-scale music festivals, Big Spring Jam is a not-for-profit event, organized each year by the Huntsville Heritage Foundation in conjunction with the Von Braun Center. Proceeds from the event benefit local charities, health and human services agencies, and arts and entertainment organizations throughout North Alabama.”
I understand the reason not to hold it downtown (lame as it was), but the reason NOT to move it to another venue was a political decision. The folks I talked to that were supposedly “in the know” say that it revolved around the VBCC group/committee that did not want to take a chance that they would not have control of it and due to THAT fact that we may lose it altogether due to political infighting. The “non-profit” part has no bearing on the tax dollars that roll into the coffers of Huntsville during BSJ, they rape the vendors on license fees and then collect a dozen different taxes from the people attending (lodging tax, gas taxes, tax on the tickets you buy, etc) the list goes on but the point is that it generated a LOT of money for the City that was not related to the “profit”. Understand that the original folks that put on the BSJ for the first few years have been replaced with less talented and more political people who can make money “disappear”. Hence the reduction in top line talent each year.
Bottom Line: Put everything else aside, BSJ was a money maker for the City in tax and related revenues that we threw out the window and that is NOT related to “non-profit”. It could have easily been held on the same property as the Fair but that did not allow the people who skimmed money the same opportunity so it was cancelled.
“FYI: Since we last mentioned this, Alabama A&M has removed their attendance figures off their site.”
I think I already mentioned the part about A&M being an institution with a history of corruption. It would be interesting to see how many family groups are teaching there now, they used to give teaching positions away to family members or at least the salaries, seems they had a couple that did not even show up for class, just took the money. Yep, that is where I want my money to go, but I guess that makes me a racist twice since I live in S Huntsville and think A&M teaches corruption as a career.
Can the City claim that sales tax/lodging revenues were increased by at least $40k that weekend? Spending $40k to make back $40k is certainly not how the City should be operating. And what about the $1.2million that just went missing at AAMU? Why is no one being indicted for theft?
Your work has just started DJ. How many times has this been done in the past? What other gifts has the City given to AAMU? Maybe its time for DJ to stop being the Kingmaker and be the King.
Oh Great & Terrible Bald-one, I wanted to ask this question on the air, but I had to hang up and get back to work.
Were there any corporate sponsors involved? Were they even invited? I find it hard to believe that none of these local Huntsville businesses in the tech and aerospace center of the south didn’t want to be involved.
If they were involved and helped offset the costs, then I don’t see a problem with how much was spent because regardless of the success, at that point it becomes a business risk with the potential for growth insted of total government waste.
If they were blocked from participating, heads should freaking roll.
Just sayin.
IMHO
“If they were involved and helped offset the costs, then I don’t see a problem”
Uh, it becomes a problem if 40K of my tax money vanishes and we have nothing of value to show for it. I don’t think anybody paid us (city of Huntsville) back any of that money unless I missed something.
You misunderstood me or I didn’t explain it right.
If private sponsors are footing the bill for advertising and promotions, I have no problem with that. Now I don’t know how that stuff works; I was assuming that the sponsors would give the money to the city, then the city would pay since no single sponsor is going to shell that much out for a crappy game.
Again, it’s a HUGE “If”. I asked if any private companies were involved (Alutiiq, Boeing, Nutherm, Wyle, etc…).
Might want to be careful, you started to sound a lot like antoine dodson there at end… Just needed a “for real.”
Lol, you DO have a for real on there! Love it. My bad ( And now I guess this is a SPOILER alert for those who didn’t get the dodson reference.)
The AAMU band needs to raise $160,000 to replace their seven year old uniforms (which were designed to last four years).
$40,000 would have gone a long way toward buying new band uniforms. Instead, it appears to have been wasted on an out-of-state school.
“The AAMU band needs to raise $160,000 to replace their seven year old uniforms (which were designed to last four years). $40,000 would have gone a long way toward buying new band uniforms. Instead, it appears to have been wasted on an out-of-state school.”
While I might be more inclined to agree with that expenditure I still have a problem with the City of Huntsville being a funding source for A&M (or UAH ) since that is why we pay taxes to the State of Alabama and tuition costs that are obscene. Is it a common practice for a municipal body to fund a state institution?
I believe that there’s too much corruption at Alabama A. & M. University. I believe that it should not have evolved into a university. A & M was becoming a good college during the decade that it kicked me out for publishing a radical publications. It had some really good faculty such as Professor James Vinson in English, Professor Dorothea Smith in mathematics, and Professor Browder in history, and others. Students were much more engaged in intellectual life then. I remember the discussions among students in the student center and dormitories. It was a college with some problems, but it was a better A & M than now. It was moving on up.
The library was used more. I know the internet cut into library use, but not that much.
If you read that publication, you’d yawn boredom. It was during the segregation era, so I understand why I was expelled. The administration was afraid of Montgomery. Yet A & M was a better school, a good college getting better. My expulsion does not affect my judgement; it was a better college then.
The administration, board, and faculty, not all but a majority apparently, wanted the prestige of university status.
I propose that the board of trustees, faculty, and the state of Alabama demote A & M back to college that prepares teachers, offer strong B.S. and A.B degrees, especially in Arts and Humanities, social soiences, and physical sciences. If there is desire for a research institute on campus, fine, but forgot the spurious glories of university status; create a strong college on the hill.
I taught at Rutgers in New Jersey, and the professors there did not like their turn at chair of department. It meant less time to teach, research, and write. Two or three years is long enough to be chair; it should revolve among the full professors in a department. That is one of the elements of corruption, too much power in one personage. Lack of a strong faculty senate is another.
I want more folk here to advocate making it a college again. University status stretches it too much and wastes money.
Well said, now that you jogged my memory I do remember A&M in the late 60s and early/mid 70s and as you say there were some problems there it was never saddled with the belief that A&M was providing a substandard education (as is the feeling in the business community now) and there was NEVER anything like the corruption that runs rampant at A&M now. My observations on the institution (based on research and conversations with graduates) is that it is just short of a “degree mill” and the administration is only interested in getting more money and raises for staff and teachers. I am still curious about the use of nepotism to supplement family income which ran rampant on A&M for years, since I retired I don’t have as many contacts as I once did but wonder if they ever cleaned that up after one of the recent presidents was caught paying a salary to his wife for classes she never taught.
PS – I am told that their degree program that prepares students for work in TV in front and behind the camera is still a very good program, I just do not have that knowledge myself.
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