The Alexandra Blossom Festival committee may have no money worries next year, with a change to the way funding is provided by the Central Otago District Council.
The committee has already spent much of the funding it hoped to receive from the council this year, and the discussion on providing that funding only took place this week at the Vincent Community Board meeting.
"I find it difficult to debate this year's funding when we've gone quite a long way into spending that funding," festival committee treasurer Leo Hulme said.
He urged the council to pay this year's grant as soon as possible.
The festival year runs from January through to December while the council has a July to June annual financial year.
The committee had contracted Project Excel in December last year to manage this year's event in anticipation of a grant being received from the board.
The board voted to provide $26,000 for event management company Project Excel as well as internal council costs of advertising ($2229), facility hire ($3278) and security services ($2185).
The committee also did not want to have to pay back any profits made from this year's festival as they had already suffered losses two years in a row.
Those losses had gobbled up the working capital, and this year at balance date the committee had $10,522 (plus the unpaid Community Board funds) compared to last year's $64,230.
"Another loss-making year will result in insufficient working capital to get through to next year's festival as we were recently reduced to $2000 in our bank account," Mr Hulme said.
The committee aimed to find new forms of sponsorship wherever possible.
Councillors agreed the situation of delayed payments was not ideal, and voted to allow the committee to come back to the council in November, when they would apply for next year's funding from the recently introduced contestable funding of $94,000 for events.
