Philly jazz festival a state-funded extravagance

In successfully seeking $1 million from Pennsylvania's taxpayers, the organizers of last month's West Oak Lane Jazz Festival said they expected a crowd that would rival Woodstock.

"We anticipate in excess of 500,000 festival attendees from around the world," reads a portion of the grant application for the June 18-20 event, which was approved with the backing of the event's influential patron, State Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.).

That would be the equivalent of about a dozen sold-out Phillies games.

To produce an event that size, organizers asked for and received $150,000 for performers, $210,000 for security, $150,000 for consultants, and $60,000 for transportation costs. Other expenses included $9,500 for photographs and videos, $16,000 for portable toilets, and even $1,000 for lanyards.

So while other public events are struggling financially and the state legislature is cutting funding to libraries, parks, and health centers, what kind of turnout did taxpayers get for their money?

Well, it wasn't Woodstock.

In fact, there is ample evidence that the crowd at times would have barely filled Verizon Hall's 2,900 seats. And that raises questions about past attendance totals used by the festival to justify taxpayer support. Organizers, for instance, declared in a grant application that almost 600,000 people - the population of Boston - had turned out last year.

This year, aerial and ground photos taken Saturday, June 19, and visits by Inquirer staffers Saturday and Sunday suggest crowds of not much more than a couple of thousand at times.

Festival videos posted on YouTube show a similar turnout during a portion of Friday's festivities.

Organizers admit they drew fewer fans than anticipated. They blamed the heat, the economy, and a weaker lineup of acts. There was still, they insist, a significant turnout. They declined to offer their own crowd estimate.

To be fair, The Inquirer did not attend the festival Friday or at all hours Saturday and Sunday. And organizers never claimed that all half a million festivalgoers would be there at one time. They also said the crowds had grown each evening for headliners such as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Esperanza Spalding, and Al Jarreau, but again would offer no size estimates.

"I don't want to get into a debate about the numbers," Evans said. "I will say this is an economic-development event. It is about jobs. It does a lot for business. It does a lot for tourism."