Brian Sharp and David Riley

Staff writers

In exchange for its annual $175,000 in taxpayer support of the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival and providing services during the nine-day event, City Hall receives 20 VIP tickets to each major show at Eastman Theatre and 20 club passes.

The city distributes those to elected officials and staff. County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency got a similar deal relative to its $75,000 support — and gives those tickets to its clients.

The city funding is to offset costs for free shows, including 10 major headliners and 36 regional/emerging acts. In exchange, VIP tickets and passes allow elected city officials and employees free access to shows that, during last month's festival, ranged in price from $20 up to $130 or $155 for orchestra and box seats. Club passes are priced at $194 each.

The city says the tickets are not considered gifts, and therefore raise no ethical issues.

"Our law department says it qualifies as a purchase," said city spokeswoman Chris Christopher.

Under an agreement with festival organizers, the city also agreed to provide police to manage traffic and other limited services to the event, such as fire inspections and setting up trash containers, up to a maximum cost of $68,000. The city also receives tickets in exchange for a similar $175,000 sponsorship of SummerFest. Various smaller events also get taxpayer assistance.

Jazz tickets and passes historically have been divided with City Council. The same number was awarded by agreement last year. This year, they were passed to the mayor's office and council members selected which shows they wanted to attend. However, the city — in response to a Democrat and Chronicle open records request — said "there are no records of who received the tickets" either for this year or 2013.

"There is nothing unusual. It has always been done this way. It is very equitable, and everybody shares," said City Council member Elaine Spaull.

Most popular among City Council, officials said, was the Earth, Wind and Fire concert. The mayor's office referred questions back to communications. Christopher said she was unaware of how distribution worked — "I bought my jazz tickets," she said — but thought tickets and passes were used as employee incentives.

Warren spokeswoman Jessica Alaimo later said that the tickets were used to thank individual employees, but there was no specific process in place to decide who received them. Not all went to managers, she said, but it was not clear how many did.

Many top-level officials were seen at the shows. It was not immediately known how they came by their tickets.

The County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency receives eight tickets for each headliner and eight club passes as part of its $75,000 in support. COMIDA offers the tickets and passes first to clients, then board members and, finally, to community partners, officials said. The agency does not keep records of recipients, and denied an open records request seeking any agreement, saying no documents exist.

County spokesman Justin Feasel said COMIDA uses non-taxpayer funds, such as application fees paid by its clients, to sponsor three local festivals: The jazz festival, the High Falls Film Festival and Fringe Fest.

The $75,000 that jazz fest received from COMIDA this year is up from $50,000 in past years, according to Feasel. The High Falls event got $2,500 last year, down from $50,000 in 2011 and 2010, and Fringe Fest received $15,000 this year, up from $5,000 in the prior two years.

The county Parks Department also provided in-kind services — including staffing, supplies and utilities — to seven other festivals last year. By far the largest contribution was $93,110 worth of services for the Lilac Festival, which in turn generated $21,110 in income for the Highland Park Trust Fund, Feasel said.

The other events received less than $10,000 each in county parks support.

Asked about details of their arrangements with the city and county and how long they have been in place, jazz festival organizers instead provided a general statement that highlighted the event's impact on the region's culture, quality of life and economy.

"This remarkable effort, built gradually over the past 13 years, requires a year-round effort of a great staff, loyal attendees, dedicated volunteers and enthusiastic sponsors," the statement said. "So we thank the City of Rochester and Monroe County for their investment in making free music available to residents and for their vision in seeing what a festival like this can bring to a city."

The jazz festival has grown into one of the city's biggest summer draws. The contract between the city and event organizers reads: "Production of the event would be in jeopardy without the benefit of city of Rochester funding up-front because deposits are required in advance for talent, staging, tents and production for the free community stages."

Festival organizers claimed that the event drew a crowd of about 196,000 people this year — 1,000 more than in 2013, and the largest crowd yet for the event.

Asked to explain how the festival arrived at that figure, spokeswoman Jean Dalmath said in a recent email that organizers tracked ticketed events at the Eastman Theatre and posted people with clickers to keep careful tabs on attendance at club venues. Attendance at outdoor stages was based on estimates of crowd capacity, she said.

Outdoor attendance was strong except for one rainstorm during the nine-day festival, according to Dalmath. The downpour on that one night did little to deter people from attending indoor performances. Along with the addition of a new 400-person-capacity venue this year — the Squeezers stage at The Inn on Broadway — the weather helped push attendance upward, she said.

Attendance has risen over the past three years with the addition of outdoor stages, including one at East Avenue and Chestnut Street, and the Little Theatre as an indoor venue, Dalmath said.

"I want to stress that we are very careful with our estimates," Dalmath wrote. "Certainly we are not able to count every person. It's an estimate and we are very comfortable that it's as good as it can be."

Dalmath said it never has been a goal for organizers to beat their attendance figures year after year.

"We have wonderful crowds and draw a beautiful diverse audience downtown every year from all over the world," she wrote.

Under the city agreement, festival organizers must provide the city with an "after-report" by Sept. 15, that includes detailed attendance records "inclusive of demographics." There also is an audit portion of the agreement that gives the city access to examine "any directly pertinent books, documents, papers and records" of the festival.

BDSHARP@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/SharpRoc

DRILEY@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/rilzd