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Ticket offers studied
The city should make a decision by April 30.
YOUNGSTOWN — Giant national ticket agency Ticketmaster says it can generate $942,000 over five years for the city if it’s selected to sell tickets for events at the Chevrolet Centre.
New Era Tickets of Wayne, Pa., projects a $1.8 million profit for the city over the same five-year time period. New Era is the ticketing sister company of Global Spectrum, one of two companies vying for a contract to help operate the center.
City officials will consider proposals from nine companies that submitted proposals for the ticketing job and should decide by April 30.
Smaller companies such as TICKETsage of Fayetteville, Ark.; EZ-TIXX of Charlotte, N.C.; and Brown Paper Tickets of Seattle proposed flat fees for each ticket sold that would be charged to the city. None of them provided financial projections.
Another smaller company, Choice Ticketing Systems of Boulder, Colo., stated it could generate $4.83 million to about $8 million in profit for the center over five years.
Veritix of Cleveland, owned by Dan Gilbert, majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers professional basketball team and Quicken Loans Arena, the team’s home court, also proposed a flat per-ticket fee.
GetTix.Net of Tempe, Ariz., has served as the center’s ticket agency since the facility opened in October 2005. The city recently gave GetTix 30 days’ notice that it was terminating its contract.
The city receives none of GetTix’s surcharge, as much as $7 per ticket, or any of the $3 handling fee on each order for events at the center.
The city was receiving a portion of parking and facility fees, typically $3.50 in total, on tickets that included those fees.
GetTix.Net’s proposal to remain the center’s ticketing agency calls for the city to receive 60 percent of the service charge revenues. That would have been $196,858.58 last year, according to GetTix’s proposal.
The documentation attached to the company’s proposal shows an uneasy relationship between GetTix and the city.
Richard Floco, the company’s president, wrote in a Feb. 14 e-mail to Kyle Miasek, the city’s deputy finance director, that he’d heard a decision was made to hire Ticketmaster. “I have no intention of being taken advantage of,” he wrote. “... With all due respect, if you have not been on the level, it is disheartening and bothersome.”
GetTix had originally proposed splitting service charge revenues with the city 50-50, according to a Jan. 2 e-mail to Miasek from Floco included in the proposal. The company then increased it to 60-40 in the city’s favor. GetTix’s proposal states it sold more than 825,000 tickets for center events since it opened in October 2005.
Ticketmaster’s proposal estimates it will sell 80,000 tickets for center events in its first year if it’s selected with annual increases of 3 percent in sales.
Ticketmaster, based in West Hollywood, Calif., is the nation’s largest ticketing agency. It sold more than 128 million tickets in 2006, according to its proposal.
The company would give the city between 25 percent and 40 percent of its surcharges with the higher amount for more expensive ticket purchases.
Tickets.com of Cosa Mesa, Calif., owned by Major League Baseball Advanced Media, estimated the city would receive about $900,000 in profit over five years if it were selected to handle the center’s ticketing operations. The deal includes a $40,000 signing bonus.
New Era also offered a signing bonus of $30,000. No other company offered the bonus.
skolnick@vindy.com