Yeah.

Good now.

Technology is supposed to make your life easier.

Thank you, Dryce.

All right.

Welcome everyone to the Thursday, November 6th meeting of the Business and Community Affairs Committee.

Today we have three items on the agenda.

The first being a report on special events attendance and visitors.

And I believe that Mr.

Olsen, Mr.

Shim, have a presentation for us.

So I'm going to turn it over to you.

Perfect.

Believe it or not, it's been about a year since we've done one of these.

We were planning on doing quarterly.

I think we got a little busy, and hopefully we'll get back into the habit of doing these.

But they're awfully fun to go look through and figure out especially these all these cool special events and festivals that we have in town and looking at our Norm Ford projects and other events that the university puts on, and even looking at our shopping centers to kind of figure out what kind of traffic's getting driven to Norman.

But uh we'll start off with well, first of all, we we never want to ignore me can out of uh out at Rees Park, which is our public art project.

He's over here supervising fireworks.

Uh I think this is from 2024.

So he is always out there making sure the baseball is getting played correctly.

Um medieval fairs happening, the technology in that robot is fantastic.

Uh this is kind of a full look over the past year since last time we did one of these reports to kind of look who's been in our town and um what what the average uh workload is.

So you look at that first uh first line that is going monthly, month by month about how many um unique visitors are coming in in town, and they have to be in um side city limits or for uh uh so long for them to actually count on that.

So you can see that that uh it does tick up in the fall, and that is connected to our uh football games when we have uh uh you know about seven football games a year, and that's attached to that.

We also have uh busy months in May, and that's attached to more likely to our grad graduation OU.

And then you do see a little bit of high high ticker ticks up in March and April, and that's our um usually our good festival seasons that we have going on.

That bottom line uh over there is uh what we call our employee line.

So that's this uh an average uh of people who are coming in and out of Norman on a daily basis uh or a monthly basis actually to work, and that's just a all in report when you start looking at those months.

Uh like we said, we haven't done this in about a year, so we went and grabbed information from all of our major festivals that we've had um uh in the past calendar year of 2025.

Start out with uh midieval fair, uh, and we'll go in there and even have a graph a little bit later on, but uh kind of uh ticking along.

We had a little bit of a rainy season uh in the spring, so that kind of hurt and dampened uh a little bit of our our visitors that came in, but on Friday night you can see that we had 15 or 10 up to 15,000 on Saturday, 22,000 on Sunday, which is if I remember right was our sunniest day, about 48,000 total.

You look at Norm Music Festival.

Uh, I think we also had some rain.

Um, but we had a large amount of rain that came in the night before, and I think it was on and off for throughout that whole weekend, but 53,000 come through there.

Pride festival that happens out over at Andrews Park.

That's a one-dayer.

Um about 4,000 people um in and out of Andrew's Park during that day, medieval fair, or uh excuse me.

I'm still used to saying middle fair, but uh Mayfair, which is uh recently popped back up over the past few years in campus corner, uh around 12,000 people uh counted through that jazz in June, 7200 people over in Andrews Park.

Uh Juneteenth uh in Reese Park, we have about 5200 that also, which is a really high number.

We also had I think it was game six of the NBA finals that night.

Um so I think that actually kind of might have hurt that number.

Uh then July 4th, uh one of our big bigger numbers in recent memory, uh almost 17,000 people, and that's just in the park.

So if you start looking outside of the um outskirts of the park, you start seeing um you we probably would have captured a lot more.

We always have a lot of people setting up um in Lloyd Noble going out even to the Walmart people um parking garages at OU.

People have their um usual traditions where they set up camp every year for fourth vests, and then our most recent one um that we just did.

Unfortunately, weather messed with that one too.

Uh downtown fest actually happened over at the WIFAC, and we had about 2800 people that ran through that.

Uh so just taking a uh a chance to look at the these numbers and line graphs uh going on.

So you start looking at year by year.

I remember uh getting a lot of text from our festival organizers telling us where all our drainage problems were.

You get a couple of inches of rain, and it does help you figure out where uh the park is holding water.

Uh but you can go in here and you see the the highest curb uh was back in 2023.

Uh we would um probably go go look at that and probably attach that that to whatever weather we're happening to have at that um year.

Uh downtown festival.

Uh you you look at that.

We did that this end.

So it got did move to the YFAC due to weather, and uh we did have that peak time right there at around seven o'clock.

Uh the festival did last from six to nine.

Uh it was pretty cool inside there.