Your tax dollars at work: $1M for poorly attended Philly jazz fest

By many accounts, Pennsylvania is bankrupt, with Gov. Ed Rendell piling up billions in budget deficits over the past couple of years.

So you'd think that politicians would be careful in how they spend dwindling tax dollars.

But when a Philadelphia group wanted to put on a music festival, it managed to get $1 million in tax dollars thanks to state Rep. Dwight Evans, a Philly Democrat who also happens to serve as Majority Appropriations Committee Chairman.

From an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

In successfully seeking $1 million from Pennsylvania's taxpayers, the organizers of last month's West Oak Lane Jazz Festival said they expected a crowd that would rival Woodstock.

"We anticipate in excess of 500,000 festival attendees from around the world," reads a portion of the grant application for the June 18-20 event, which was approved with the backing of the event's influential patron, State Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.).

To produce an event that size, organizers asked for and received $150,000 for performers, $210,000 for security, $150,000 for consultants, and $60,000 for transportation costs. Other expenses included $9,500 for photographs and videos, $16,000 for portable toilets, and even $1,000 for lanyards.

So while other public events are struggling financially and the state legislature is cutting funding to libraries, parks, and health centers, what kind of turnout did taxpayers get for their money?

Well, it wasn't Woodstock.

In fact, there is ample evidence that the crowd at times would have barely filled Verizon Hall's 2,900 seats. And that raises questions about past attendance totals used by the festival to justify taxpayer support. Organizers, for instance, declared in a grant application that almost 600,000 people - the population of Boston - had turned out last year.

Read more at the newspaper's Website.