Sustainability Fair in Port Gamble.

.....Received an interesting phone call yesterday. A while back this lady contacted me. She was interested in putting together a festival to be held in Port Gamble. The festival was to be akin to what the Oregon Country Fair used to be back in its 'hippy' days. She asked me how June Faire was set up and run and how we interacted with Olympic Properties Group (OPG) in the use of space at Port Gamble.

.....This lady had attended June Faire and called me to ask a bunch of questions about how we thought June Faire went. What worked and what didn't work. She was hoping to glean some information that she could use to help with the set up and running of her own fair.

.....I was extremely careful to be neutral to the best of my abilities. On the good side I spoke of the relative flatness of the site. The fact that it is ONE compact site instead of an event that was spread out and around the town. I spoke of how well the bus shuttle from the park-and-ride worked and how few emergency issues we had. On the 'issues' side I spoke of the cars getting stuck, the boggy portions of site and all the divits and ankle busting, uneven ground. I spoke of the small size of the parking lot and the overall small size of the usable area.

.....Then we started talking about the set up of her own fair. They are going along the lines of what the Civil War Re-enactors are going to do in that the uplands (the June Faire event site) are going to be used as parking and the hill side (espresso stand side) of Port Gamble is going to be their actual fair site. I gave her some ideas based on how we've set things up in the past with camping and merchants and archery and we bounced ideas off of each other.

.....One of the things she really liked about June Faire was our use of pavilions around the erics. She was wondering if there was some way she could rent them from us for use at her fair. I told her that several of the ones she really liked were owned privately by others but that I would pass her request on to those owners and get their reaction.

.....But then we got to what I thought was the really interesting part of the conversation. When she first spoke with the town and started laying out the contract, OPG told them that they could use the entire town for their festival. She has this in her notes from the first couple of meetings she had with the town. In fact she got names and made sure that they repeated this as they went over the map in the OPG conference room so that there were no misunderstandings. However, at future meetings the amount of territory that her festival would be allowed to use changed, first in size, then in location. The hilltop was taken away from her first. Then the ballfields. Then she was told that her event had to move in its entirety across the road to the espresso stand side of town.

.....As she related this story and her frustration at getting a.) a straight story out of OPG, and b.) a CONSISTENT story out of OPG I started recognizing some of the same storylines that were used on us over the past year. This lady's group finally drew a line in the sand when OPG tried to tell them that they had to hold the event itself out in the uplands and showed them the notes detailing what OPG had originally promised them in the first place. It made me realize just how naive WE really were in our dealings with OPG and how I wish we had taken notes a lot more seriously then we did.

.....There were a number of things that OPG told us initially we could do if the uplands did not work for us in one way or another. Later, when the story changed unfortunately WE did not have an adequate history of notes to which we could point and say 'Here is what you said we could do, why is this changing and how much of the rent are you going to reduce for us to make this concession.'

.....Lessons learned for me, that's for sure. We need to go into ANY negotiations for use of space with a business attitude. Business is business. It's that simple. If we are naive, we will get taken to the proverbial cleaners. Honour and chivalry may have their place in our philosophy and in our game, but in reality they have to be balanced with business tactics that are used in the modern world. John Wayne supposedly said something similar in a philosophy of which I like to remind myself from time to time, 'Life's tough. It's tougher if you're stupid.'

.....It'll be interesting to see how this lady's festival turns out.

.....Aaron / Arontius.