New Sunset Celebration guidelines OK’d
Fighting to maintain its 10-year hold on managing the famous nightly Sunset Celebration in Mallory Square, the Key West Cultural Preservation Society (CPS) approved a draft set of management guidelines last week that it hopes will satisfy city officials and allow the non-profit to continue supervising one of the city’s top tourist events
CPS had a 10-year lease to manage Sunset Celebration that expired last month, forcing the city, which owns Mallory Square, to put the non-profit Society on a month to month agreement while a new contract is hammered out. But lease negotiations have faltered while CPS attempted to find internal consensus on how the popular event is managed.
CPS Treasurer Ron Lane said the board approved a proposed new set of guidelines for managing the vendors, artists and performers who gather nightly at Mallory Square. He wouldn’t elaborate on how the guidelines have been changed but said the previous 10-page list of standard operating procedures has been reduced to two pages in an effort to satisfy city officials, who, Lane said, asked for the changes.
“As it is now, everything is micromanaged by the city. That’s basically what we’re trying to negotiate with the city,” he said.
However, Key West City Manager Bob Vitas disagreed with that interpretation. He said that while the city has oversight of the SOP, it only wants to ensure that all the artists, performers and vendors are “treated equitably and fairly.” He said there is an internal dispute at the CPS over how the event is managed that is the cause of the lease renegotiation difficulties and that until that dispute is resolved by CPS board members, the lease will continue to be in limbo.
“There are obviously two schools of debate over there. They need to clean up their own house and if they can do that, bring it forward. We don’t want to get caught in the middle of that debate,” he said, adding that some of the CPS board members have approached him independently to inquire about taking over Sunset Celebration. He declined to identify who those board members were.
CPS Manager Dave Delrosso, who manages the organization’s financial accounting records, told board members last week the new SOP that will be sent to the city to jumpstart lease negotiations would be an abbreviated “Reader’s Digest version” that would not have “the minutia” that the previous version contained. However, a more extensive set of SOP would be developed by the CPS board for its own use in managing the Sunset Celebration, he said.
“We don’t want to have to run to the city every time we want to change some little thing,” he told the board at its meeting last week, adding that the new SOP would contain significant changes.
What those changes are has not been released. There has been concern from some of the Sunset Celebration entertainers that a grandfather clause protecting long-time participants would be eliminated, forcing them to compete with newcomers for choice performance and sales spots. However, Treasurer Lane said the grandfather clause will remain in the guidelines. Lane said one thing that has changed in the draft SOP is that food purveyors will now have to participate in the nightly lottery that determines location on the Square. Previously, their locations were determined by seniority, not the lottery.
CPS Board member Elise Scott, who has been the board’s liaison with the city for the lease renewal negotiations, has come under fire from some of her colleagues for allowing the 10-year-old lease to expire while still working on updating the SOP. She said the draft guidelines will now be sent to the CPS attorney. Once he signs off, the SOP will be sent to Vitas as part of the organization’s pitch to continue managing Sunset Celebration.
“We’ve done what we need to do to keep this ball rolling,” she said at the CPS board meeting last week.
CPS was established in 1984 to support the arts and its main function, according to its website, is to manage Sunset Celebration. CPS rents Mallory Square Dock from the city for $5,216 a month and, in turn, rents space to the entertainers, artists and food and drink providers each night.
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