Proposal to the site for festival organization PLEASE READ!!

Okay, I know I'm not giving everyone enough time to really look over this and share their ideas, since we have to submit this proposal to one site by tonight and talk by phone with another site at that same time.

So, I'll lay this out here and then send all y'all Sneeches a tribe message...get your ideas and comments in quickly! Sorry that this is immediate, but, that's the way these things usually go. We've been mulling over half-formed basic proposals for a few weeks since we started this, but now's the time to jell them up.

Here are the factors that the land owners want to know about...how many, when, and what insurance/infrastructure.

Here is what I propose we propose, and why...

INSURANCE. It's a nightmare. As best I've been able to determine, having done *some* but maybe not *all* the insurance research in the world, our biggest problem with insurance isn't the cost of the insurance itself, but the cost of the deductible. The best I've been able to find so far seems to be about $500 for the insurance itself, with a $2,500 deductible.
I'm going to be working here using that figure, and if it turns out that any of us can find something better, we'll revise our ticket costs accordingly before determining a final ticket price.

Believe it or not, I've had Good Souls offer to put the deductible up in case of a claim, but I've said no to this, simply because I don't think any one person should be out that kind of money because the site got set on fire.

So we need to include $3,000 in our ticket costs for that. I propose that that deductible ($2,500) then be held in trust for future events. We can't know until after a festival if we'll need it, and it'll be needed for any future festivals, unless we can locate the Crazy as Hell insurance company that doesn't need a big deductible! :)

How to do all that will be part of another conversation, How to Deal with the Money. We will have a little more time to determine that amongst us, that's not part of a proposal, but we'll need to decide before we can sell tickets.

However what IS part of the proposal is how tickets will be sold, and really it's kind of not that negotiable, we need to sell tickets online so that we'll have a certain amount by a certain time so we can go forward with this.

The site fee...okay, one site said we could do it at their place for $1 a head, but I'm saying, that's not enough. I think that the site should get at least $5 a head. That guy (the Alchemy site guy) is an awesome supporter of countercultural happenings in general, and I think we can all stand to give five bucks for him and the maintenance of the site.

Is everyone happy with this? Keep in mind that we'll have to give PayPal more per ticket than a dollar!!! We need to support good people and not just corporate things like the insurance company and PayPal with what we're doing!

The funny thing is that he's probably going to argue, but a friend of mine knows his wife and we'll MAKE him take the $5 a head.

He has said that he can lease portajohns for $65 apiece, I'm intending to say that we'll lease 4 portajohns for the baseline of 250 people, and add another per 100 people. In my experience with large crowds and their poop that should be about right.

For medical and infrastructure, I'm intending to promise that we'll have at least one experienced medical person (doctor, nurse, EMT, etc.) onsite for up to 250 persons, and to add at least three more up to our cap of 1000, with the addition of lots of medical volunteers and medical equipment like bandages, antiseptics and so forth.

For fire protection, I'm intending to promise that we'll have at least a "fire truck" (we have a workable plan to turn a pickup truck into a fire truck for the weekend, using 55 gallon drums and air pressure)...as many fire extinguishers and 5 gallon buckets standing around as we can muster, and many volunteers to keep an eye on things. I would love to promise an experienced trained fireperson and we'll try to get one or more, but so far I don't know who that is...but it doesn't take TOO much experience to yell FIRE and throw water if we're on top of things!

For setup and cleanup, I'll tell them that we'll be responsible for all that, and for returning the site to as reasonably close to its original condition as we can.

For promotions, I'm intending to tell them that we'll promote the event online through private lists like tribe.net, on Burner lists, and through some other private lists that we know of, as well as creating flyers that can be handed around from person to person, but that we will NOT promote the event "publically", by putting up posters in clubs or ads in local papers, nothing like that.

For who can come...now I know some of you are going to scream about this, but it's *not* an arguing point, and I'm about to tell you why.

People attending this event must be over 18.

And here's why...it's a federal child sex crime to engage in overt adult behavior with children present, THE END, no arguing. This legal responsibility extends to the festival organizers as well as the parent/guardian and the person committing the "crime" of being topless around minors.

It's considered to be a child sex crime if we do things as innocent as going topless or spanking people at the gate. We flat out SHOULD NOT expose the organizers, the children themselves who could be ripped from loving homes, the innocent couple having fun giving out love spankings in revealing attire, and all the other festival goers who didn't buy a ticket to come to an event being raided by CPS, SWAT, the FBI and other agencies due to children being allowed.

Some of you know that there was a big ugly incident of this nature earlier this year and that Transformus was specifically mentioned. I personally have communicated the reality of the legal situation to the BOD and community, and I'm uncomfortable that they continue to insist that it's not an issue when it IS, that the disclaimer covers this legal situation when it doesn't, and that it's okay to continue to state that Transformus is abiding by all laws in the organization of the festival when it isn't.

That's why I'm saying no one under 18 isn't really debatable, it's totally unfair to ignore this reality for the good of the whole festival. Frankly this situation isn't very child friendly anyway, as much as I appreciate that some folks love taking their kids everywhere.

But, we have another group that usually gets dissed that love taking THEIR kids that we CAN satisfy, their fur kids that is.

Most every event says NO DOGS NO PETS, but gosh a lot of folks love to take their pets. Now, *this* is debatable, I personally am inclined to allow the animals, I don't think it's that much hassle or additional security needed. The good thing about animals is that as far as the legal stuff goes, the law is very clear, all actions by an animal are the sole problem of the animal's owner, the end. So, we can't increase the festival's potential liability with this decision. But, y'all let me know what you think.


Here's the basic idea...we have a baseline for the festival, and that baseline breaks down like this...(these are ballpark figures, but it's going to be close)...

This is all based on the idea of a minimum of 250 attendees. The reason for this is that that's the very minimum that we can hope to cover that awful insurance/deductible base with, without making the ticket costs WAY high.

Our idea is that we will set up ticket sales ASAP...over the next week or so...and everyone get as many tickets as they want, heading toward that 250 minimum. If we do NOT have sales of 250 minimum by June 1, we can cancel and refund everyone's ticket costs *minus* whatever fee Paypal charges for the transaction, which is like a dollar something, sorry but I've spent too much time today trying to find where that exact figure is on PayPal's site, and I'll find it later but it's more than a dollar and less than two, I remember.

That gives us this basic budget...

We need...

5 x 250 for the site = 1,250
insurance = 500
insurance deductible = 2,500
fire truck/safety/medical equipment=500
portajohns 65 x 4=260
misc. festival costs which will NOT include transportation=300

Total 5,350

Keep in mind that some of this is guesstimating, like the fire equipment costs and misc. costs, but most are real costs.
Also note that this is the BASELINE of costs, for instance we haven't yet spent a dime on wood or fuel which we would like to provide!

At this baseline our ticket costs should be around $22.

If we had to cancel because we don't have 250 by June 1, we can still take whoever's interested into national park lands or something where insurance isn't an issue.

Any ticket sales ABOVE the baseline of 250, I think that for this festival we should then use those funds to benefit THIS festival, not to try to sock anything away (other than the deductible which we can't spend in advance, obviously). We could let folks vote and have a lot of input on how any further funds were spent. Wood, fuel, food, and so on.

Some of this that I'm rambling about isn't specific to the proposals for the site, but it's stuff I want to get on the table at this point.

One thing is that TOTAL TRANSPARENCY is important, and I'm going to provide it. Some decisions aren't really "votable", like how much insurance costs, but everyone should be informed of everything, all along the way.

For this festival, NO COMP TICKETS. Obviously whoever owns the land has the right to have themselves and certain people on the ground, but no "free invites to the party". I haven't talked to these festival folks about this, but if they want some passes I'll tell y'all all about EXACTLY how that's going to happen. We'll provide some real accountability at the gate to assure everyone that it's really happening this way. It's not that hard, venues have to deal with this issue all the time.

And oh yeah, we're initially thinking a cap of 1000, but the most likely site might allow us more if there's a demand.

Whew...there is probably a lot I haven't thought of...gotta work on this with y'all today to get to a clear proposal by this evening...HELP!! :)

XXXOOO,
Me