In the past week we have heard plenty of hype and propaganda regarding the purported “profits” made from the TomsRiverFest festival. According to preliminary assessments reported by school superintendent Mike Ritacco and Mayor Paul Brush, they claim to have made a $600,000 “profit”. Ritacco, an administrator with a salary to rival King Solomon, and Mayor Brush who is a CPA, should know better than to inflate the amount by not including the $60,000 that Dover Township incurred into it’s operating expenses. If you subtract the $60,000 of overtime police pay and other municipal expenses incurred, you then end up with $540,000. Based on the $2.5 million taken in in sales, that would give you a 20% profit. I hope they are also taking into account gasoline and wear and tear on the “RiverFest Rabbit” buses.
   The real heroes of this lofty enterprise is the 2000 volunteers, some of which worked the entire four days. If you take the total man hours worked and multiply that amount by a reasonable pay rate including payroll expense, you will find that the $540,000 “profit” would quickly become a loss. That doesn’t also take into account all the free radio hype and other donated expenses. I wonder if any of the volunteers were pressured into volunteering seeing that most came from the school system?
   Now I shouldn’t complain if 2000 people want to take the time to sit in the hot sun and maybe reduce my property taxes, but I wonder what effect this festival had on the local taxpaying businesses? If there were 15-25,000 people at this event each day giving their money to carpet-bagger vendors, then there were almost that many people not patronizing local taxpaying restaurants and area attractions. What effect did it have on Seaside Heights?
   We also heard another reason for this festival was to evoke community pride. You can evoke community pride in me by not raising my taxes 22% in one shot. Or to waste my taxes on pay-to-play goniff lawyers and astro turf, that will evoke community pride in me. I wouldn’t go to RiverFest if you paid me $25 to go there. Most of the people I talked to said they wouldn’t pay $25 just to go walk around some carnival. They can take a car load of people to the Ocean County Fair for $5 or go to Founders Day or Seaside Heights for free. For ten bucks you can go to the circus and the proceeds go to help your local church or VFW. Then there seems to have been some confusion about the pricing, a lot of people initially thought the price of admission included some of the shows.