The Sanford Center Malfeasance

I have a long and storied history of opposing the Sanford Events Center in Bemidji, most publicly during my run for Mayor in 2008. The years before that, I protested its construction, spoke against it directly to city council, and supported the organizing of a petition (completed with the required signatures) to place its funding on the ballot. That petition was rejected by the council who didn't care what the community had to say. A crowd of frenzied artists had managed to get Deb's vagina beaver put back that year, but threatening the event center money pit was a bridge too far.

By the time I was actually running for mayor, my position had shifted from opposition to reluctant acceptance. Not because my concerns had been addressed, but because the city had already sunk millions into planning. Killing the project at that point would have meant lighting taxpayer money on fire, a further result of the same cowboy politics that had pushed it forward in the first place.

So my stance became this: if the Events Center is inevitable, then it must at least be a community-centered space, one that provides access to as many people as possible. 

I did not get elected mayor. Spoiler alert.

What followed over the next seventeen years has been a masterclass in doing the exact opposite.

After a decade of mismanagement the city sought an alternative to VenueWorks (whose director embezzled tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars) and landed on ASM Global, a corporation whose name alone practically hums with community spirit and access. Ever since the building opened, I have tried, as an independent artist, to book a space to stage my work. I am willing to pay! To help dig out of the money pit! But no. No, I'm afraid not. Not once has it worked. Every time there has been either an insurmountable barrier or deafening silence.

Seventeen years of being shut out of the largest performance venue in town. A venue that annually posts nothing but six-figure losses. That’s the part we’re supposed to ignore, because profit (we’re told) was never the motive. The deficit is always explained away as being offset by increased tax revenue around events.

That is some truly hopeful math.

Half a million dollars in the hole is reframed as a towering success through economic impact studies and accounting gymnastics. But people are not that stupid. Not all of us, anyway.

That’s where the city’s involvement seems to end: creative math, outsourced management, and an apathetic shrug. No meaningful oversight. No accountability. Just a quiet agreement that the losses are acceptable so long as no one has to answer for them. The council gets paid regardless of how much money they waste.

Meanwhile, access to the space remains functionally restricted to those of a certain class. The community, it turns out, is not everyone. It’s those who can afford ticket prices, rental fees, and negotiate past the many barriers to access.

When the rare non–horse-shit act does appear, it’s often an insult dressed as spectacle. Where is my sweet Westley? We were promised Willie Nelson and delivered carbon-monoxide monster truck poison. Not even consistent poison you could plan for from year to year. There are no big acts. Few interesting acts. No community acts. A hockey stadium built for a team that can't afford it.

Either the center is being managed by the most incompetent production team in the galaxy or competence was never the goal. Because no matter how badly the ship is steered, everyone involved still gets paid.

It's the public who pays the price.

The city needs to stop pretending this is working. It needs to acknowledge their responsibility, provide real oversight, and finally make the Sanford Events Center accessible to the full spectrum of the community it was built with public money to serve, from the very rich to the very poor.

Anything less isn’t just failure.

It’s malfeasance.