City gets earful over rodeo
Council may not have budgeted enough money to host Finals

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Come July 2, the 700 participants of the 2005 Wrangler Junior High School Finals Rodeo, their families, friends and fans and their horses, of course are coming to Gallup. But will Gallup be ready?

When the City Council approved a contract with the National High School Rodeo Association Nov. 9 to host the event at Red Rock Park, it put aside $400,000 to get things ready. But to hear City Manager Eric Honeyfield tell it, there's not much chance the city will be able to get the park ready for that much, and some councilors and residents are getting worried about where the rest of the money will come from.

Dudley Bierly, chairman of the Gallup Chamber of Commerce's rodeo committee, was confident about the $400,000 figure when he presented it to the Council in November. By the time he returned from the Rodeo Association's mid-winter meeting in Denver Saturday along with Mayor Bob Rosebrough and Chamber Director Herb Mosher, he was already talking about looking for grants to cover the overruns.

How much those overruns will be, the city really has no idea yet because it doesn't even have a budget for the event. With the rodeo hardly five months away, the councilors at least agreed that the city should try putting one together rather soon.

Steve Coleman didn't like what he heard. The local arts and crafts dealer berated the mayor and council for committing to the event before having a good handle on how much it would cost the city, that is to say the tax payers.

"Before you put a bunch of money into this, you need to think whose is the money you're spending, and that's the taxpayers, that's us," said Coleman.

The mayor tried to get a word in once Coleman began to raise his voice, but Coleman persisted.

"Before you do anything, you need to know how much it's going to cost us," he said.

If it costs another $200,000 of taxpayers' money to put on the event, he asked hypothetically, is the expense justified simply because the city has already sunk $400,000 into it?

"If I were a business man, and I were running a business," he said, "this wouldn't make sense."

The councilors weren't as disturbed by the potential overrun they went into the deal forewarned that the $400,000 might not be enough, after all but shared Coleman's concern about the persistent uncertainties.

Honeyfield wouldn't guess how much more the city might have to spend on getting Red Rock Park ready for the rodeo, venturing only to say that the $400,000 Bierly and his committee came up with in November would prove "way low."

The $400,000 most of it to install 500 new stalls at the park is coming from the part of a recently approved bond reserved for capitol improvements. Assistant City Manager Larry Binkley said there was some spare money in the bond for some overrun. If that overrun started to turn serious, however, he said the city would have to start getting more creative.

Rosebrough defended the city's hasty financial preparations for the rodeo. With so little time between the contract's approval and the event, the mayor said it was the best the city could do. And in response to Coleman's criticism of carelessly spending tax payers' dollars, the mayor reminded him that the Council had at least saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by handing daily operations at Red Rock Park over to a private management company, Global Entertainment.

Global too, the Mayor added, will be kicking in $100,000 to get some 500 camp sites at the park ready by July.

In return for the investment, the city is hoping the rodeo will bring millions of dollars worth of new business to local merchants, and prepare the park to make bids for even more and bigger rodeos and events down the road.