Mayor Mike McGinn’s unusual inaugural festivities—which featured jugglers, dancers, musicians, and performers walking on stilts—cost the city around $10,000, a records request reveals.
Not counting overtime paid to two city employees, six employees who took “flex time” (taking off another day to make up for working during McGinn’s Saturday inauguration) and three employees whose pay information and hours worked during the inauguration were not immediately available, the total price tag to the city for the January 9 event was 9,825.07.
Most of that money paid for city staff time during the event, held on a day when City Hall would ordinarily be closed. City employees staffing the event included arts program employees, janitors, events coordinators, planning and development specialists, license inspectors, and several fire and police department officers.
Also on the city’s inauguration tab:
• $446.11 for electricity (the cost of keeping the lights and heat on at City Hall on a Saturday, when they’d ordinarily be off);
• $2,400 for entertainment, including $300 for Recess Monkey, a kids’ band; $300 for Northwest Tap Connection, a rhythm tap dance troupe; and $500 for Circus Contraption, a local burlesque/performance art/ circus company;
• and $176 for private security (in addition to $2,814.35 for four Seattle Police Department officers).
That $10,000 figure (a fragment, it should be noted, of the city’s $900 million-plus general fund) doesn’t include any of McGinn’s nighttime inauguration festivities (including a free show at the Showbox in SoDo), because those were paid for out of his campaign funds, not by the city.
