Scott Swanson
The numbers are still being crunched and bills are still being paid, but this year’s Oregon Jamboree has been the highest-grossing ever, festival Director Erin Regrutto told Sweet Home Economic Development Group board members Wednesday, Aug. 20.
Despite the challenges associated with a new, larger stage, 3,000 more people on a newly designed field, new cabanas on the field, an expanded main beer garden that accommodated many more patrons, and more campgrounds, the 22nd Jamboree went well in nearly every respect, Regrutto said at the SHEDG board’s monthly meeting.
“We closed at 96.3 percent of our budgeted ticket sales and sold a total of 14,755 items,” she said, noting that the festival budgeted optimistically this year. Those numbers represented “more ticket revenue than the Jamboree has ever brought in, in the history of the event,” – a 5.3 percent increase from last year.
The average daily attendance this year was 17,500, with an 18,000-person sell-out on Saturday for the line-up headlined by Tim McGraw.
Advance sales for 2015, for which headliner Keith Urban has already been announced, “are very comparable to 2014,” Regrutto said, adding that the numbers fluctuate almost daily. Renewal tickets are available to patrons through the end of August, and will be followed by the upgrade process, which lasts for about two months.
“Once that is done, and everything goes to the public on sale, we will have a clearer picture of what to expect for 2015,” she said.
Regrutto said that the reconciliation process, which includes collection of revenues and payment of bills for this year’s festival, is ongoing and it will be months before final tallies are available.
“This takes weeks and weeks to reconcile,” she said. “A lot of money comes in after the event.”
Among changes and improvements to the process that her staff is working on, Regrutto said one goal is to discontinue use of scrip tickets, which patrons use to buy food and drink inside the event. They pay $1 per ticket, which are then turned in by vendors for cash from the Jamboree.
Until this year, the festival staff weighed tickets to determine how many there were, but she said there have been inconsistencies in that process and one year the festival paid out some $40,000 more than it should have because the tickets weighed heavy.
This year, the staff has counted the tickets one by one, but that process is laborious and time-consuming and it means that vendors don’t get their money as quickly.
She said the plan is to switch to radio frequency identification bracelets, which would electronically keep track of people entering the festival and the purchases they make from vendors. Patrons will be able to load their bracelets with funds to spend in the festival site, recorded on a chip.
Board members were effusive in their assessment of this year’s festival.
“Everybody considers it a success,” President John Wittwer said.
Rick Ely, who is new to the board, said he talked to many patrons, vendors and volunteers and the feedback he got was uniformly positive.
“It was amazing,” he said. “I’m really impressed. I was amazed at how loyal they were.”
Wendi Melcher, who manages the beer gardens, said she was “shocked at how well we did.”
Regrutto, who has been festival director for four years through five festivals, said this year was the best ever for her.
“There was just something about the event this year that made it really, really fantastic,” she said. “Usually when I get into the office on the Monday following the event, I have a bunch of weird e-mail complaints. This year I didn’t have anything like that. From the public’s perspective, this was the best year yet.”