Organizers vow to keep gay-pride parade going

The all-volunteer organizing group of the Seattle Pride celebration Tuesday night decided to go ahead with plans to stage the parade along Fourth Avenue downtown, but scrap the festival that traditionally has followed.

The vote by the board of Seattle Out and Proud came only hours after the group -- staggering under $102,000 in debt to the city of Seattle from last year's event -- announced it would cancel both the parade and festival planned for June 24, file for bankruptcy and dissolve.

Troy Campbell, a board member and spokesman for the group, said an outpouring of support from the community persuaded the board to change directions.

"We feel the parade should go on as planned," he said. "It is something that has always turned a profit and that will allow us to chip away at the debt and not walk away from it."

Campbell did not say how the group plans to meet its financial obligation to the city for use of Seattle Center for the 2006 festival, only that "it will be dealt with."

The Seattle Pride parade and festival, which began in 1975 in downtown's Freeway Park, has grown to become one of the largest gay-pride celebrations in the country.

In 2005, organizers changed the group's name from the Seattle Pride Committee to Seattle Out and Proud, and the following year -- amid protest from some in the community -- moved the festival from Capitol Hill's Volunteer Park to Seattle Center, and the parade from Broadway to Fourth Avenue downtown.

The move turned out to be an expensive one for the group -- more costly than some board members say they'd anticipated, with bills from the city reaching $102,000.

In recent days, the board has struggled publicly with how to pay the debt and salvage the event.

On Monday, it announced the possibility of scrapping the parade and festival entirely -- and allowing another group to take them over. By early Tuesday, it issued a statement announcing it would file for bankruptcy and dissolve the organization.

Campbell said that decision created "communitywide disappointment."

"It was really nice to have people contact us to say how important the parade was to them. The community deserves this," he said.

He said there are so many Pride weekend festivities in the city that the board decided it was not essential to have a festival after the parade.

"People will have options," he said. "There are other parades that don't end with a festival. This will be one of them."

Seattle is among dozens of cities that host parades and festivals on the last weekend in June to honor the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York that marked the start of the modern gay-rights movement. And for three decades, it found a home on Capitol Hill, the heart of the Seattle gay community.

Seattle Out and Proud includes just a dozen volunteers, with no paid staff and an office rented for $190 a month that's used for storing parade flags.

Board members have said financial naiveté -- coupled with a desire to make last year's celebration the biggest Seattle had ever seen -- may have led to many of the financial problems the group now faces.

"The event has been around 30 years," said Weston Sprigg, the group's vice president. "People look at it, and it was so fine-tuned, and last year it looked flawless. I think people think it's a huge organization behind it, when in reality, we're not. We're a PTA."

With its move from Capitol Hill to Seattle Center, costs doubled -- but revenues did not, Sprigg said.

Organizers could use Volunteer Park for free and the event there cost them about $120,000 to produce, most of which was paid for with parade registrations, booth rentals and sponsorships. The group finished the festival in 2005 about $12,000 to $15,000 in debt.

By then, though, the festival was outgrowing the park. The event was limited to one stage, the group couldn't set up a beer garden and it was difficult to accommodate people with disabilities. Seattle Center seemed the logical place to hold the larger crowds, Sprigg said.

John Merner, Seattle Center deputy director, said that in October 2005 he estimated for the president of Seattle Out and Proud that the cost would be close to $96,000 for use of the Center.

But Sprigg said that as a board member, he didn't know until May, a month before the Seattle Center festival, how much it would cost.

"Maybe that would have been a time for us to say we're not going to do it," Sprigg said. "We're at fault for that."

At Seattle Center, jobs that volunteers had done in Volunteer Park had to be performed by union workers. At the same time, controversy over the move from Capitol Hill to downtown cost the group hundreds of volunteers, a board member said.

Plus, instead of one stage, organizers needed four, as well as more portable toilets and fencing. With a two-and-a-half-day festival, entertainment cost tens of thousands of dollars. Including the non-Seattle Center expenses, the 2006 event cost $250,000.

Responding to anger among some in the community over the change of venue, the LGBT Community Center on Capitol Hill started planning events there for the same weekend, which further split resources, Sprigg said. Longtime corporate sponsors Budweiser and Microsoft chose to support the Capitol Hill celebration, and loss of those sponsorship dollars also hurt.

Sprigg said that while Seattle Center was great at planning logistics, "they don't do a lot of help on the budgeting part; they just assume you're going to pay the bill, right, wrong or indifferent."

Now, with penalties and interest, Seattle Out and Proud owes the city $102,000. "It's a bake sale that got out of control," Sprigg said.

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com;

Sharon Pian Chan: 206-464-2958 or schan@seattletimes.com