Ignacio Velazquez sat down to discuss the rally’s prospects for this year and years to come. Read what he has to say.
Editor’s note: This is part of the annual Pride section. This year’s theme is “Made in Hollister”.
Mayor Ignacio Velazquez during his campaign to become Hollister’s first at-large mayor stressed the importance of reviving the city’s traditional event, the downtown motorcycle rally, which has drawn close to 100,000 visitors in years past. City council members declined to risk anymore taxpayer funds after the July 2008 event, during which Hollister lost more than $200,000. Much of the rally’s cost, though, was due to law enforcement costs that skyrocketed in a relatively short period of time under former Police Chief Jeff Miller. Among the changes for the 2013 revival, Velazquez and other city officials have approved a $114,400 law enforcement budget, less than one-third of the cost in 2008. Velazquez sat down with Connor Ramey to discuss the rally’s prospects for this year and years to come.
Free Lance: First off, where are you at in the process and what does the timetable look like?
Ignacio Velazquez: We have, obviously, the promoter and the manager working on the major sponsorships, still. We are actually meeting (this) week or later to start going over more of the details of the full plan. We are going to work that out and make sure everything is in place and look for areas that we need to improve on.
FL: You mentioned the full plan – can you talk about that for a little bit?
Velazquez: The full plan is security. It’s vendors’ location spots, it’s sponsors, it’s revenue of how much money is coming in and are we meeting our goals. What do we expect in attendance? Are we hearing more of that or less talk of attendance? We are trying to get more – we are trying to get a better map together so when we move to May, we are really making sure that we can adjust everything.
FL: What are the goals that you have? Is May the big month for you now?
Velazquez: My goal is by mid-May we need to have everything buttoned up. All we are waiting for is the event. So we can get all of our volunteers together. All the sponsors and all the vendors know what is required of them. The rules, everybody needs to be clear so it’s not the chaos that it was the last time.
FL: During your campaign, the biker rally was a focus. What are some of things you can do to help move it forward and what are you doing?
Velazquez: What I’m doing is staying in constant contact with the manager in making sure I’m pushing at them to provide the answers and keep on track so we don’t have a falling off in the end or before the event starts – making him aware that our community is probably different or that it is different than Daytona or Sturgis. A lot of times the managers or promoters want to duplicate it and I don’t think you can do that in our town. So when he has an idea I will say that will not work for this reason. Or that it’s a good idea and maybe that will work over here.
FL: You mentioned the promoter. This is the second time the city has hired a promoter. What are some of the issues when you choose someone to balance out what is right for the city and also the biker rally?
Velazquez: Personally, I wasn’t involved. I was involved with the last minute as far as finalizing the contract. But for me personally, the promoter has to have a sense of reality and has to know that this is a different event, has to be willing to work with law enforcement and, to me, the nonprofit groups. Because if we are not including the nonprofit groups and the community in the event, we are not having an event. That’s the … I think people really need to understand that part of it. I’m pushing hard to make sure we are including as many nonprofits as possible.
FL: You mentioned, it’s a different type of event than Daytona or Sturgis. What makes it so different here and why is it so important to focus on those differences?
Velazquez: I think because in our event, it’s such a small town. It’s not like in Daytona that you have all these different people. People will come out to our event from San Jose and San Francisco for the day. They would drive from Los Angeles for the night. It’s a different model, I believe. Sturgis, people go out for the week. Here, people are coming in for a day. We have a flow of people coming through and these peaks, especially on Saturdays, get 70,000 to 80,000 people in downtown. It’s quite a few people to deal with that quickly.
FL: How do those differences benefit the city?
Velazquez: That’s the question. How do we capture more of that benefit? How do we produce more revenue from it? Although, the hotels are booked there are only so many hotels here locally. The surrounding communities are also benefiting and, obviously, we are making additional revenue through sales tax. But we need to find a way to keep more of the money here. That’s how the nonprofits are involved. We need to keep more of a balance. If they have more food stands or the beer garden, that revenue is now staying in the community and being used by the community again for local projects.
FL: What are the expectations financially for the area during the rally?
Velazquez: Well, we are looking at $250,000 to break even. And that’s obviously the minimum goal that we have. We are looking for ways to push that to a much higher number but we need to meet that goal first. And with each year we can look at it and decide what the correct price points are for vendors for the food booths or admission to the event. I’m a big believer that I believe we need to start talking about charging admission to the event. That’s a great way to raise a lot of revenue in a short time.
FL: You mentioned that you are planning on 70,000 to 80,000 people in attendance. One of the main reason why it’s coming back is cutting the budget and a lot of that came form the safety budget. How do you balance that risk of so many people and less security?
Velazquez: I wouldn’t say less security as much it’s not obsessive, where we have helicopters flying around and 100 CHP officers and every law enforcement agency in the state here. It’s working with what we have in a smarter way. If you break down our streets at Fifth, Sixth and Seventh streets – if you had 10 officers on Fifth and 10 on Sixth and 10 on Seventh and a few here and there, you are looking at 50 to 60 officers. We know from history by 8 p.m. in the evening people are gone and it’s only a crowd here or there. It doesn’t require 50 officers to be hanging around. It’s a better plan that has been put in place that deals with it more realistically. … This is a better plan altogether. It’s more realistic. It will fit the rally better.
FL: You mentioned growing the rally and bringing more people in. What are your expectations in growing the rally over an extended amount of time?
Velazquez: Over the next five years?
FL: Yeah.
Velazquez: Well I think the goal here is first to .. is to look at what happens with this rally. But, you know, part of the drawback we have is, the area we have is limited. So to grow to a rally to 200 (thousand) to 300,000 is not very realistic in our community even if it’s spread over a few days. There goes the question of if there is admission charge, where does it balance? Where is the price point that says 100,000 of the best people are willing to pay to come to the rally? And 200,000 people don’t want to contribute and don’t want to come. How do we work that number out? And we will learn that over the next few years.
FL: Hollister has a very proud biker history, especially in downtown. Why was it so important for you and the community to bring this rally back?
Velazquez: I guess I can go back to when I was opening my restaurant. And when I looked at the restaurant and the idea of the restaurant, the numbers to make a restaurant work in the town at the time weren’t there. But the potential of making enough revenue because of the rally gave that ability to – or the opportunity – to give it a shot to see if it would work.
And that’s what happened. Because of the rally it became a Christmas season – for a lack of a better term – for that type of business. That inspired other people to start opening their business. Eventually you started to have an explosion in downtown in early 2000. Several businesses were open.
When the negativity started, people started saying that we don’t need this, we don’t need that. I pointed out if you came out on a Sunday prior to 2000, you wouldn’t see a soul on the streets. If you came out on Sunday in 2002 and 2003, you would see several people walking the streets of downtown Hollister. And a lot of them were tourists looking for pictures for this famous place, the birthplace of the American biker.
People didn’t understand. They thought without the rally we would get this magical town back, though it really wasn’t there anymore, and we would have parades and the stores would be open on Sunday and people would enjoy the downtown again. The reality is that on Fourth of July weekend, downtown is shut down. There is nothing open and because we pushed everybody away. There is no more tourist walking around downtown exploring what we have here. It came back to hit us on the head, which I think a lot of people knew would happen but several people were blinded by the realities of it all. It’s a P.R. campaign that costs nothing, a million-dollar P.R. campaign that cost us nothing.
FL: How do you recapture that early 2000s feel with the rally?
Velazquez: I think it’s going to happen naturally. I think this year, you are going to have the start of it. People are going to realize it’s real again and you are going to start having business owners wanting to get into the downtown market to work throughout the year, but also through the rally. Then you are going to see building owners start to reinvest. And when you start seeing more restaurants open, you are going to see more foot traffic and it will start feeding on itself.
FL: What is the ultimate goal of the rally?
Velazquez: I don’t know if there is an ultimate goal yet. Obviously, we want a successful rally that brings people to our community that are spending their money – a rally that brings in revenue for our nonprofit groups that we can reinvest in our community. It’s a chance to bring everybody together. I think this is most important thing: If we don’t live together, we die together.
No not everybody profits from the rally, but some people do. And some people don’t profit from the Christmas season but some people do. But if we don’t shop at Christmas those people don’t and it all works together. As soon as you start to understand that and stop complaining about being some inconvenience, we are going to have a better community.
