Karen Heller: Taxpayers shouldn't foot the bill for West Oak Lane Jazz Festival

Did you miss Woodstock? Bummer. Fortunately, organizers of last month's seventh annual West Oak Lane Jazz Festival envisioned a crowd that would rival Woodstock, "in excess of 500,000 festival attendees from around the world."

Given performances by Esperanza Spalding and Al Jarreau, the event more closely resembled the Newport Jazz Festival - that is, if Newport was a Northwest Philly neighborhood without the ocean view or Gilded Age mansions.

Hopes were high for attracting an international audience right there on Ogontz Avenue.

Alas, a far smaller, if enthusiastic crowd of maybe a couple of thousand attended, according to videos, photos, and reporting by The Inquirer's Christopher K. Hepp.

Which is truly a bummer.

The three-day festival was free to the public.

And, then again, not.

Because you, dear reader, paid for the festival to the (free-form jazz) tune of $1 million through the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corp. (OARC), the tax-exempt, taxpayer-supported nonprofit group founded by State Rep. Dwight Evans, chairman of the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee.

This support is $1 million more than what the commonwealth gave to the July Fourth Welcome America festivities, which drew crowds Ogontz Avenue could only dream of.

Meanwhile, city parades, athletic competitions, heritage events, and even Mummers go scrambling for funding.

"I don't want to get into a debate about the numbers," Evans said about attendance, though he has no problem with numbers when it comes to securing state grants for OARC, scads in the past decade.

Consider this: $29.3 million in tax dollars went to his pet charity. That's an amount that would impress even Vince Fumo.

As Mayor Nutter said at the jazz festival, "This is the neighborhood that Dwight Evans built."

True, but with your money.

"I will say this is an economic-development event," Evans said. "It is about jobs. It does a lot for business. It does a lot for tourism."

Right, because when tourists come to this city, they head straight for Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and West Oak Lane.

At a time when funds for state parks, environmental-protection programs, libraries, and health-care centers are being slashed, thank heavens there's still money for a jazz festival's transportation needs ($60,000), lanyards ($1,000), and portable toilets ($16,000).

Your tax dollars are, literally, in the toilets.

Expenditures included $210,000 for security and $150,000 for "consultants," the black hole of appropriations, a fee equal to the entire amount spent on all the festival's performers.

This entire incident would make a perfect installment of Stephen Colbert's "Better Know A District," in this case the heavily funded 203d. (The fact that Pennsylvania has 203 legislative districts, while the California State Assembly has 80 is another absurdity for another day.)

Maybe Evans has gone Hollywood on us, and all he wants to do is produce.

Instead of Jay-Z, he's Dwight-E.

Like many entertainers, Dwight-E, or rather his favorite nonprofit group, has performed astonishing acts of charity.

Last year, OARC bailed out the failed Mount Airy nightclub North by Northwest for more than $760,000 - and it's not even in Evans' district! It's miles from Ogontz Avenue.

You will be shocked to learn that the still-shuttered club was owned by a consortium of prominent business and community leaders who had previous dealings with Evans.

OARC president Jack Kitchen defended the $1 million investment in the jazz festival, saying it may take a month or more to assess the actual crowd size.

"The success of the festival is not based on how many people show up," he said. "The West Oak Lane neighborhood and Philadelphia were still showcased to tens of millions of households through a media blitz. That is positive play for Philadelphia."

Media blitz? Where? Tens of millions? Right. Only $85,000 was spent on advertising.

Frankly, I don't care if 2,000 or half a million folks visited Ogontz Avenue in June. A community festival, serving not an international crowd but a powerful state representative's district, shouldn't be wholly funded by unwitting taxpayers in a recession of diminishing revenue and skyrocketing needs.

Looking at the videos, the festival looked great. I wish you'd been there. I wish I'd been there.

I just wish $1 million of our money hadn't been there.

Fear not, though, about missing the West Oak Lane Tax Dollars Festival. While funding was drastically hacked for so many important state programs, the commonwealth has generously given a $821,000 grant for all that jazz next year.