Nuit Blanche seeks $85,000 funding increase for 2017
Organizers of Nuit Blanche, a night of arts and entertainment that took over downtown Edmonton last September, are hoping to cash in on its success to launch the next instalment.
“I think we had 53,000 Edmontonians who came downtown on a Saturday evening in the shoulder season when they’re not usually downtown,” said Todd Janes, chair and president of the Edmonton Nuit Blanche Society, following a community services committee meeting Monday.
Janes said the economic impact was estimated at around $425,000 for Edmonton from a city investment of $250,000 in cash and inkind support like police and transportation.
His group began planning the sequel — expected to go ahead in the last week of September 2017 — almost immediately after the cleanup for the 2015 event was over. Janes said collaboration with art curators and sponsors has been a time-consuming ordeal, but has been met with support.
For the next event, they want to increase attendance to 75,000 and hope the city will be able to scale up its part of the funding to match — asking for about $85,000 more, for a total of $335,000.
Between a less vibrant economy and a new municipal operating budget model, that may not be an easy feat.
“We’re coming up to a set of budget debates that we’ve never had before because we’re basically augmenting a three-year budget we’ve already set,” said Coun. Ben Henderson, who fought to bring the first event to the city and would like to see it return.
“I don’t know how much money there will be to play with, if any at all, and I don’t know how we’re going to deal with this kind of request. My gut feeling is that council would like to see this happen and we’ll probably do whatever we can to make sure we don’t lose it.”
Though it’s an arts event, the fact that it didn’t begin as a grassroots venture and uses continued successes to grow makes it different from what the city’s arts council usually deals with.
Henderson said the difficulty is finding a strategy for one-off events of this scale to get city funding without having to develop a new plan every time they seek financial backing.
“We have to have a way to step in or say we’re never going to have them,” he said.
The committee agreed to develop a service package for the $335,000 to be debated during this year’s budget discussions in October.
Janes is confident the next event will go ahead in September 2017. And though he wouldn’t reveal details about what it will include, the general premise might foreshadow the evolution of arts funding that Henderson is hoping for.
“A lot of it will be about how the city moves,” he said.