How's Britney doing? Not well enough to break even yet.

A while back, the City Beat played this game where I tried to figure out how many Britney Spears tickets Grand Forks' Alerus Center has to sell to break even and came up with 12,500.

So far, I don't think the city-owned events center has done that. Executive Director Steve Hyman told me he'd "get a hand and a foot cut off" if he revealed how many he's sold, referencing confidentiality agreements with the concert promoter. After a few probing questions, I basically asked the question that really would matter to taxpayers: Are we going to break even on this?

"It's doable," he said, which I took to mean it's not yet done.

As you know, there's that $750,000 to $850,000 guarantee the Alerus Center made with the promoter so, if the promoters don't make that much from ticket sales, taxpayers will have to foot the bill.

Bear in mind, of course, that there's going to be some kind of economic impact from having even 10,000 people come to town, so the question of losing tax dollars or not isn't so clear cut.

Steve told the Alerus Center commission this morning that sales are "encouranging." Afterwards, he told me that while that Neil Diamond fiasco was underway -- ticket sales were much less than expected so taxpayers had to foot some of the guarantee -- he got calls constantly from the promoters. With Britney, he said, they're not calling.

Still, considering the hoopla surrounding the announcement that the Alerus Center got Britney, I had the impression that most of the tickets would've been snapped up by now.

It's hard to underline how important this concert is for the Alerus Center. As I and others have said before, if something this big loses a lot of money, the events center will probably never be able to take a risk on a big concert again.

Also, the center is in the hole by $256,600 at the half-year mark when it's supposed to be ahead by $14,600. Steve says he still expects to break even and, if revenues aren't so hot, he could still cut expenses.

Posted by: Tu-Uyen on 7/29/2009 at 9:44 PM | Comments (19) | Permalink

Tags: alerus center, britney spears, budgets and taxes, gf and egf