EDMONTON - Festival and event organizers face the prospect of a 50-per-cent increase in policing fees by 2016.

Edmonton police officers provide security oversight and traffic management for hundreds of concerts, sports games, parades, road races and other public gatherings each year. Last year, police worked 1,314 different events.

Because such events often take place on weekends and evenings when officers are off-duty, those on festival shifts typically earn double-time. Deputy police chief Brian Simpson says the Edmonton Police Service hadn’t raised rates since 2007.

“We weren’t covering the full cost,” says Simpson. “We worked out that we were subsidizing events by up to 30 per cent.”

This January, festivals and other city-sponsored events learned policing costs were going up 17 per cent, from $82 an hour for a constable to $96 an hour. The fee for a police car went up, too, from $50 a day to $30 an hour. Not all of that money goes to the officers: the figure includes administrative overhead, too.

Next year, prices are projected to rise by another 32 per cent, to $122 an hour for a constable. Yet over two years, that’s an increase of just under 50 per cent.

“I understand totally that it’s a huge hit,” says police Insp. Gary Godziuk, who’s in charge of festival and event liaison. “But it’s a huge hit that comes on the heels of no increase for eight years.”

Godziuk says the EPS has to raise fees in 2016 to cover expected increases to police salaries. But he says he’s done “tons of consultation” to prepare festivals.

That’s not how everybody sees it.

“Seventeen per cent, followed by 32 per cent? It’s just not on,” says Terry Wickham, producer of the Edmonton Folk Festival. “I just don’t know how they justify that. I think city council has got to look at it, really. If they want festivals to fold, this is how to go about it.”

Wickham says he’s personally very happy with the service his festival has received from EPS. And his own policing bill isn’t that big: he contracts with the EPS for traffic control at the top and bottom of Gallagher Park hill. But for smaller festivals, Wickham says, a major increase in costs like this could be devastating.

If police had raised costs by three per cent every year, in line with inflation, he says, festivals could have budgeted for it. But a 50-per-cent increase in two years?

“It’s just not reasonable economics, given what’s going in Alberta these days.”

The Edmonton Fringe policing bills are low: they already save money by hiring private security, says executive director Jill Roszell. They also get good service, she says, from Old Strathcona beat officers. Still, she says many smaller festivals have been caught out, because they didn’t have time to re-write their grant proposals to ask for additional money for policing.

“This is a significant jump and they didn’t let us know in time to to adjust to it,” she says. “It’s a concern when city costs increase and our grants don’t.”