I've heard a lot discussed this past week since the bit Pow Wow was approved by the Tourism Commission as a project. Mainly, how many people are truly interested in seeing how this goes and want to attend, but also how Estep and Tipton are totally against it, Tipton for parking, Estep just generally against it.
Tipton obviously carries the torch for Estep, a former chairman and tourism member, but it's strange how he invokes the parking issue. His own business requires you to use on street parking, and doesn't provide customer parking on his own lot. Maybe he should close or move to a spot with adaquate parking for his clients.
Estep's problem, planin old sour grapes. He no longer has a say or control over the tourism money. Strange how he talked about taxpayers money being spent, when he himself hands out $25k checks to nibroc without an inkling of accountability.
But, the topic here, is the pow-wow vs. the horse show. Of course, there is no horse shot this year, due to the fiasco at the old civic center location and the illegal project the city allowed to come to fruition.
If the pow wow draws even half their expected turnout, they will surpass the horse show attendance in past years. There are many more native americans around the area, and that travel to native american events, than there are horse show partons.
I've been to the last several horse shows. There was good attendance, not great, but good. Mainly friends or family of the showers. Most people associate attendance with the amount of cars in the parking lot. You can't do that at the horse show, as the trucks and trailers take up huge amounts of space. So what appears to be a full lot, is actually the participants just parking their rigs. Again, there was good attendance, but not great. The gate money, well, no one ever reports that to the public, so we'll never know how financially successful it was.
The Pow-wow, we'll just wait and see. And, also, most importantly, the tourism committee directed Ms. Myers to keep strict accountability on how the money is spent, something Tipton and Estep have never done. I'm sure we'll know to the last penny where it goes.
