Budget matches buzz for Bacchanal concert

On Saturday at 6 p.m., Bacchanal will host its annual concert on Low Steps featuring musical acts of Montreal, Ghostface Killah, and Wiz Khalifa. Despite New York’s thriving music scene and variety of venues, the prime location and free price of the Bacchanal concert help make the event one of the most talked-about of the year.

“My only expectation is that the Columbia community will be high in attendance and everyone will enjoy themselves, because that really is the point of the concert,” Bacchanal president Alex Kirk, CC ’11, said.

Club members estimate that approximately 1,000 people attended last year’s event, which may be largely in thanks to Bacchanal’s quest to create a high-quality event featuring widely popular acts, chosen in the hopes of transcending differing student tastes.

But what is the real price tag on this large-scale, highly publicized concert? According to club officers, Bacchanal’s total budget allocation is over the $100,000 mark—a figure similar to Varsity Show estimates—to help pay for the high-profile bands and the equipment, promotional materials, tech fees, miscellaneous items, and services for Bacchanal Weekend.

The club requests a pre-planned amount of funding from the Activities Board at Columbia and then receives its allocation at the beginning of the year. ABC is part of Columbia’s student government, operating under the Office of Student Development and Activities, which funds many student groups on campus that mostly focus on the arts or other special interests.

“The allocation is almost always lower than what is actually requested,” Bacchanal treasurer Cleopatra McGovern, BC ’12, said. She explained that every figure in the budget is estimated slightly higher than necessary to account for unexpected costs at the concert and the weekend’s other events.

Despite its sizable budget and undergraduate hype, ABC representative for the arts Cliff Massey, CC ’10, said that the event is not given preference over any other activity. “ABC considers Bacchanal’s budget using the exact same guidelines we do for other groups, regardless of group type or group size,” he said.

In a time of University-wide budget cuts, some might expect that Bacchanal’s cushion would be a giant target, but the opposite is true. “Because of the success of last year’s concert,” McGovern said, “our allocation was larger this year than ever before.”

Nonetheless, organizers say the money Bacchanal receives is hardly a blank check.

“Spending Columbia’s money is very hard to do and takes a long time,” McGovern said. “In the past, several vendors have not agreed to work with us because it took so long for them to actually get paid by the University.”

The administration has also turned down many of the club’s ideas for Bacchanal weekend, McGovern said, such as “a petting zoo, Jell-O wrestling, or anything that involves touching the lawns.”

However, McGovern said that the biggest administrative roadblock the club has faced is the distribution of free T-shirts at the concert.

“It is a Columbia rule that we can only spend money from revenue on T-shirts, not from our allocation,” she said. “Since Bacchanal tries not to charge for any of its events, it’s always a scramble to find money to pay for our T-shirts. The University has refused to budge on this issue, even though we give T-shirts out as promotional items.”

But meeting the administration’s rules and guidelines isn’t the only budgetary obstacle Bacchanal has to overcome—this year, in particular, the club lacked co-sponsorship on many fronts.

“We have received no co-sponsorship this year from CUArts or the class councils, whereas last year we received about a total of $15,000,” McGovern said. “So in that way, we felt the budget crunch.”

According to CUArts events and outreach coordinator Chad Miller, Bacchanal received funding last year from the Arts Initiative’s general fund, but this year was a different story. “This year, Bacchanal applied directly to the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Fund,” Miller said. “The funding resource has several guidelines that were not, as sometimes happens, met by the application.”

Despite these challenges, Bacchanal is anticipating a great show. Although the club planned for a thousand attendees, more than 1,600 Columbians have RSVP’d to the Facebook event.

“Sure, we would like a huge crowd to turn out,” Kirk said. “But as long as the students are having fun and like the artists we bring, then I will be extremely happy.”