St. Cloud City Council held another special meeting Thursday to discuss City processes for special event and facility rental processes. Former Economic Development Director Antranette Forbes and Parks and Recreation Special Events Manager Erin Jenks were present to answer Council’s questions.
Introducing the meeting’s topic, Mayor Chris Robertson said, “The past couple of weeks, we've been discussing these events that we've been having, and there's a lot of moving pieces. We want to get behind and understand all the moving parts … why something happened this way, that way.” Speaking of the recent Vanguard and Proud in the Cloud events, Robertson added, “I do want to say that I think Parks and Rec did an amazing job. Both were amazing events, and we want to continue having amazing events in our city. But we don't want to do it at the expense of the taxpayer.”
Members of the Council had questions about those two events, as there had been confusion about when the venues were booked and how much the groups had been charged.
At the June 18 meeting, Council member Jen Paul said that she had received an email from an event coordinator who said their event had been moved from The Ranch to the Civic Center. “They originally had a conversation about their event being at The Ranch, but I guess she received a call from Parks and Rec of the event being moved to the St. Cloud Civic Center,” Paul said. There's definitely a miscommunication along the way.”
Deputy City Manager Scott Davidoff noted Thursday’s that Parks and Rec staff had no knowledge of the Vanguard event until very close to the event date.
“There was never a time where the City staff would have even known that the event was even looking to come forward. There was no application, no phone calls, nothing for that date,” he said.
“Everybody was a little all over the place,” Robertson said. “And the fact that there was a lot of information we weren't provided throughout this process, we wouldn't have been provided a week and a half prior to making that decision … had I had that information, had I known that the Black Empowerment Group had interest in that as well, had I known that nobody put a dollar down on this property for another 32 days after we made that decision … I would have voted no. Because I have to look after the taxpayers' dollars.”
