Various campers and vehicles along a path this morning in the park. (Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze)
The GoogaMooga event is clearly a non-park purpose that severely impacts Prospect Park, impacts that the park has still not fully recovered from last year. Privatizing park land in order to enrich promoters is certainly not why the park was created. And to add insult to injury the park receives a pittance for this inappropriate use.
In fact according to the license agreement FINALY obtained by NYC Park Advocates the Prospect Park Alliance (PPA) is actually set to get $ 25,000 less than last year!
Yes, less money after last year's debacle.
The Alliance will receive $ 75,000 dollars this year compared to $ 100,000 last year. The City is also requiring that the Police Department be reimbursed to the tune of $ 347, 147,00 dollars, compared to $ 300,000.00 to cover expenses at last year's event.
Or put another way the City is receiving more than three times the amount to police it than the park is getting to host the event!
On that issue - besides trying to minimize the impacts, since last year the Alliance's spokesman Paul Nelson has also been desperately trying to spin it that somehow the park's creators Frederick Law Olmsted & Calvert Vaux envisioned the park be used for these types of purposes -ie. private events. (It's safe to say if the City agreed they wouldn't be requiring it to be reimbursed for police services.)
SuperFly New York Festivals, the event's creators, are entitled to keep all revenues including money from concessions and sponsorship sales.
The agreement also requires SuperFly to prevent damage to the park and to reimburse and Parks Department and or the PPA to repair the area to the condition existing prior to the commencement of the set-up. An issue that Brooklyn residents have complained about since last year.
The agreement also allows the Parks Commissioner and or the Prospect Park Alliance president the opportunity to "briefly address the audience."
Golf carts galore. The seizing of public parkland. (Photos: By Matthew Wils)
The stage is located next to a Green Heron nest according to Matthew Wills. "I hope the brooding mother isn’t thrown out because she lacks a VIP Backstage Pass," he writes.
The April 19, 2013 agreement was signed by Bloomberg family friend and DPR revenue and marketing head - Betsy Smith, as well as PPA president Emily Lloyd.
The Alliance is also using the event to sign up addtional members with bribes to score "free tickets."
"After last year's fiasco, the Prospect Park Alliance is allowing the disorganizers to add an extra day of events, commented Anne- Katrin Titze who has been raising the alarm since last year's disastrous pay-to-play blow-out.
"The free tickets to allow you to wait on long lines to buy beverages and food are gone, unless you agree to become a member of the Prospect Park Alliance. They have closed off access to try to get naive park visitors to feel as if they are being treated special, when all they are doing is selling, selling, selling."
Map of event. (Click on image to enlarge)
"In 2004, I spoke with Adrian Benepe, who was then the parks commissioner, about the desire of hundreds of thousands of Americans to protest the Iraq War and the Bush administration by marching through the streets of our city for a rally at Central Park’s Great Lawn," Mr. Powell writes.
Mr. Benepe and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg were adamantly, passionately opposed to letting protesters set foot in the park. We have, Mr. Benepe said, resodded and relandscaped. Our grass is lush and green and precious.
“Central Park is a respite from the city, a place for people to lay out and picnic,” he told me. “They have a right to protest, but they don’t have a right to destroy the Great Lawn.” Allowing tens and tens of thousands of foodies to descend on Prospect Park’s sylvan Nethermead for the insistently, cacophonously commercial Great GoogaMooga festival is another matter altogether. A march to the Great Lawn was about free speech and dissent; GoogaMooga is about good old commerce," Mr. Powell wrote.
However when it came time during the legal proceedings to remember why Bloomberg had denied the group's access to Central Park
the Mayor's memory conveniently collapsed. Thank goodness his Parks Commissioner Adrain Benepe put it in writing.
Public/Private Partnerships
And why is an event like Googa Mooga which cleary has no park purpose being allowed in the park in the first place and who is making these decisions for our public parks? That's easy, not the public.
We are in this position because of a lack of accountability. Our parks are not funded as an essential city service. The City is increasing relying on so called public/private partnerships to plug in enormous funding gaps due to the elected official’s refusal to adequately our parks.
Many officials have attempted to pass the responsibility off on private groups or concessions. The city continues to try and abdicate its responsibilities by entering into these agreements which the elected officials are not only allowing but actively encouraging. Besides the enormous disparity these public/private partnerships deals create, they also hand over enormous power, decision making ability and policy to these groups with little transparency and accountability on what is supposed to be public land.
Accountability & Transparency
Despite repeated requests last year the Prospect Park Alliance including Emily Lloyd and spokesman Paul Nelson refused to answer basic financial questions relating to the event including how much they are receiving.
Officials have continued to obfuscate. The Parks Department has withheld documents relating to this event. In early January NYC Park Advocates FOIL'd the Alliance and the City for all correspondences including emails relating to the googa mooga event. Four days ago - after reminding them that not a single document was received the agency sent the license agreement but not the vast majority of what was requested. The Parks Department then said they needed "till the end of June" to fully comply.
