This year, as in years past, the City has allocated $30,000 to support "events, event series, or other tourism-related initiatives." To be eligible, events must be ADA compliant.
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| Hudson Jazz Festival 2025, Sounds Around Town--Photo: David McIntyre |
The deadline for submitting applications is 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 16. At 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 16, the Common Council Finance Committee will review the applications. To submit an application, click here.
To see what events were funded last year, click here.
The day Hudson's event budget drops to zero is the day I will celebrate. There's almost no application of $30k that wouldn't provide more benefit than the current system that splits that amount of money into pointless molecular-sized micro grants for events that would either be fine without it or that no one cares about.
ReplyDeleteYou know what those of us residing in Hudson will celebrate? The day that folks in Greenport stop weighing in on what happens in Hudson. I hear there may be fireworks.
ReplyDeleteZing, pow.
DeleteHear, hear. The day our elected officials ignore Greenport and the Facebook echo chambers they whine in, the better off we’ll be. Hudsonians and constituents first.
DeleteWell, no one lodged a complaint to me last year when I did the same thing but I guess then it suited the agenda and now it doesn't.
DeleteI suspect that some of those beneficiaries thought I did it just to do them a favor. It wasn't the reason.
The thread of comments on the write-up about what was funded last year are really interesting to read.
ReplyDeleteThis might be a typo... but if the deadline is on the 16th, and the decision is 90 min later on the same day.... How will the decision makers have enough time to review the applications and make an informed decision on merit?
DeleteNo doubt all involved are well intentioned and this is a holdover from last year's budget pre Ferris/Morris.
But this is why Classical Liberals believe government should not be kingmakers and grant makers.
There is no way that one of the applicants (not selected or relatively paired down) will not feel unfairly treated.
And then being a recipient of public funding, they arguably have a greater public duty to be fair themselves etc.
Who decides that project X is more "worthy" or more important than project Y. All this leads to more politics.
The government should just do Public Safety, Public Works, Public Administration to support the first two and collect taxes, and HCSD does Public Education.
It is not a typo.
DeleteHCS, you espouse a very constipated vision of local government, one at odds with Hudson's modern history, and that, frankly, makes no sense.
DeleteWhile you're right that the timing of the applications/decision making is laughable, that's correctable. But your fretting over "who makes the decision" is disingenuous: politicians make the decisions; they always do. And, by the way, those are the same politicians you exhort to "just do" the basics -- which still requires dozens of decisions to made and then steps executed. Whether handing out money (strategically or otherwise) or making policy, that's what we elect the council members to do. The fact that the majority of the sitting council is effectively intellectual and kinetic deadweight, unfit to make almost any decision besides "what's for lunch?" is an entirely different matter.
Mr Friedman -
DeleteYour call out is reasonable, but then also illustrates our point.
In a municipality / City / Country, where the government is a "night-watchman state" ... elected and appointed leaders make very few subjective decisions.
They simply protect life, liberty, and property. (Protection of Negative Rights).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
We recognize NY State and Hudson are in some ways the opposite... and maybe that is why the state and city are both losing population and have more political acrimony.
It is fascinating to watch people elect and deploy a system that is worse on almost every objective metric, other than creating public sector jobs.
Kinda why we write observations about it... we now have readers in other states who look at Hudson with both fascination and pity, quietly grateful they aren't the ones paying the taxes for this kind of political experiment.
Isn’t it time to cut back?
ReplyDeleteThe time line is very new. For decades the timeline was a full month after the committee received the applications. They saw them for a month deliberated and discussed fun amounts.
ReplyDeleteThis new timeline is left over from the last six years of mismanagement.