The SECA Commission recently met to make their first round of recommendations for this year’s fund.
The big change this year is that the commission will not be covering the full cost of city services required for events, which includes things like police, security, garbage collection, and EMTs.
Traditionally, SECA has covered the entirety of these costs but with more applicants and less available funds, the commission decided it would be better to fund more events but at a lower level.
“The city service requests portion of what we had would have been 70 percent of our allocatable funds and there are so many deserving events that support a diverse set of our community that we wanted to allocate money to those events and less toward the city service aspect,” said SECA Commission Chairman Rick Grimes.
A few events that will be affected as a result include Ribfest, the Last Fling, and Christkindlmarket.
SECA funds come from the one percent food and beverage tax here in town.
The SECA Commission will meet again on October 21, when applicants will have the opportunity to request changes to the initial recommendations.
Naperville News 17’s Blane Erwin reports.
