While the City Advertising and Promotion Commission’s workshop on Nov. 12 was about the 2026 budget, conversation moved to the issue of a 2018 agreement that took effect in January 2019 on how the CAPC and city maintain the Auditorium. In that agreement, the city is listed as the one responsible for paying the utility bills of the Aud.
Commissioner Heather Wilson-Vinson said she was “flabbergasted” that the city had not spoken up about the agreement, saying that it was years of the CAPC paying utilities it should not have. Finance Director Ty Reed noted that the CAPC began paying the electric bill of the Auditorium in January 2022 which coincides with when the CAPC moved offices into the building.
Tourism Director Mike Maloney suggested commissioners dig through meetings from 2022 to see if they could find information that alludes to an agreement between the city and CAPC on who would pay utilities. He said he’d only found one snippet after listening to hours of meetings and wasn’t sure where the conclusion had been made that the department would pay but said that something had to have been done at the “city level or CAPC level” as the CAPC could not have just voluntarily decided to pay the utility bill. It was mentioned that both the CAPC and the city are currently going through records to see if there had been documentation of such an agreement or if it had been verbal.
It was said by several commissioners that the commission could not continue to operate on a nebulous verbal agreement and that there needed to be a physical record. While there was back and forth on what to do if the city had actually been responsible for utilities for the past three years, it was agreed that with the city and CAPC both digging for records after the 2018 agreement that it would need to be revisited. The topic is to be broached at the next city council meeting.