Editorial: JazzReggae Festival needs to plan for future financial sustainability
By Editorial Board
Jan. 15, 2015 12:00 a.m.
Of the past 12 years that UCLA has held JazzReggae on our campus, the large festival has run a deficit 10 times.
Skyrocketing operational costs and decreasing ticket sales have meant that JazzReggae relies on unstable sources of funding to stay afloat, including student fees paid out to the Cultural Affairs Commission and double-dipping in the Undergraduate Students Association’s surplus funds.
Because of its gradually worsening financial situation, this year’s JazzReggae has been shortened from two days to one and the venue has been changed from the Intramural Field to the Los Angeles Tennis Center, which accommodates far fewer people.
Those cost cutting measures may end up being a good thing. The festival is too expensive and lacks dedicated sources of funding that will not take funding away from student groups and other student government offices. Organizers of JazzReggae would do well to continue finding ways to reduce costs as well as initiate a referendum for a small student fee increase to give the festival stable, dedicated funding that prevents it from eating up funds meant for other events or organizations.
This kind of small student fee increase would be chump change for the student body at large – $1 or $2 per quarter, not including summer. It should mimic the framework of the Bruin Bash Referendum, which passed an increase of $1.33 per quarter in spring 2014 to fund the large concert at the beginning of the year. The measure was fairly popular and passed by 60 percent of the vote, demonstrating the student body’s willingness to fund these kinds of events.
The allotted funds from that referendum ostensibly keep Bruin Bash from relying too heavily on surplus funding, meaning that more of the student fee money left over from the previous year can be funneled back to student groups.
That’s a model JazzReggae should follow.
Almost every year, JazzReggae takes tens of thousands of dollars from the Undergraduate Students Association’s surplus fund to support that year’s concert. There is no inherent problem with that fact; councilmembers often use surplus funds to put on programs or events that serve the community, and it’s often worth the money. But it is a problem when JazzReggae comes to depend on a volatile pool of money – surplus varies drastically from year to year – to fund itself. That is not a sustainable model.
Additionally, every year that the concert runs a deficit, the money to make it up has to come from somewhere. It ends up being paid for by general Undergraduate Students Association funds, money that would otherwise be put into the subsequent year’s surplus funds.
That essentially means that every year JazzReggae and Cultural Affairs Commission is taking from surplus funds twice: once from the current year and once from the following year.
JazzReggae is a popular and worthy cultural program that means a lot to its organizers and to the people in the Los Angeles community who have been attending the event for more than 25 years. But this is an unpredictable and frankly unfair way to fund it. The fees it uses to fund itself are fees that can’t go to other student groups and cultural organizations.
Stabilizing funding sources and shrinking the festival down to reasonably match with ticket sale profits is the only way to make sure this cultural tradition has a sustainable future.
