The Operations Committee met on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at 6:30 PM in Council Chambers to review the 2026 Powell Festival, discuss its financial and operational impacts, and consider potential changes for the 2027 event. The meeting included presentations from staff on vendor surveys, foot traffic analytics, financial data, and public safety. Committee members discussed the possibility of consolidating the two-day festival into a single Saturday event. No formal vote was taken; staff will bring a recommendation to the September meeting, with a goal to finalize plans by late October or early November for the 2027 budget.
Good evening. I'd like to call tonight's operations committee meeting to order. Elaine, can you call the roll? Yes, thank you. Here. Carl's crawl. Here. Here. Lester. So the first thing on our agenda is approval of last meeting's minutes. It was included in your packet. Can I get a motion to accept said agenda? Moved. Second. Great. All in favor? I'm glad you're all here tonight. Powell festival for 2026. Staff have some thoughts that they would like to present to us. And I'd like you guys to keep an open mind as it's a lot of things to look at. Great. Andy, I guess to you or just sort of a general overview. Kind of coming back out. The city made a lot of efforts to reactivate the space downtown, in particular the green space, and that was kind of anchored with a new investment into the PALFest. And around 2021, 2022, the event itself changed. We brought in larger acts, bigger crowds, a lot more volume and drive more businesses activity. As we move forward, we'll talk about this tonight, thinking about the future. Definitely a rare tear on the community. It's a large subsidized program on behalf of city funds in addition to the dollars that are generated out there through sales and uh tickets. But with regard to uh Friday and Saturday, there's a significant impact to mobilization. So I'm already starting to get a little anxious about Powell Fest 2027. Um we still got to go through the winter. But it's a it's an impact to the downtown. We've had some negative feedback from some of the impacts to the businesses. Obviously, it generates a lot of traffic. Uh what we did is prepare kind of an overview summary of a couple of different sets of information for you and a couple of recommendations, just recommendations to talk through, but um staff will go through kind of a general impact analysis on the operation itself, mobilization, and also financial impact. Um, and then beyond that, uh Sean has some economic impact information we'd like to show everybody about where the subsidy is actually going, who's benefiting from it. And then we had a recommendation uh to either continue the event as is on a Friday and a Saturday or to consolidate the event to have two acts on Saturday, which would allow for additional time for preparation focus. There is some concern, obviously, that that would have an awful lot of activation on that one Saturday, but it's something that we were talking about as a means to transition into the future, looking at the possibility of a one-day event as opposed to two. So that's a general high-level overview of what we've been talking about. Um I'll turn it over to staff uh for some festival highlights and insights. Uh Missy. Um so we always put out uh three surveys. One is to the public, one are to the vendors, and one are to the local businesses, downtown businesses. Uh this year we had 22 submissions from vendors, uh, all very happy. They did note that they do about 20 to 25% of their business on Friday, and the majority of their business is on Saturday. The food trucks mention that that two-day window, we contain them. So once we put the barriers in place, we do not move them, and they are not allowed to exit and come back for safety reasons. Uh that can be a heavy lift due to grease, um keeping food refrigerated and things like that. Um, but uh for the most part the vendors were very happy with the foot traffic on Saturday.