Reviewing the Festival

It took five days, but blog staffers finally found a Mission Viejo resident who attended the Sept. 12 Readers’ Festival at the community center. Competing events on Sept. 12 that drew Mission Viejo residents to other cities included a TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party in San Juan Capistrano and the Tall Ships Festival in Dana Point. Bloggers apparently weren’t the only ones who had trouble finding Readers’ Festival attendees who live in Mission Viejo, as none were quoted in OC Register or Saddleback Valley News articles.

Isn’t it interesting how quickly the city staff went into spin mode? Prior to the event, city employees stated that 5,000 attendees were expected. That number was never mentioned again nor was any estimate provided of actual attendance. The only person reporting to this blog arrived in the afternoon and said the event “wasn’t crowded.”

Here’s the report from the Mission Viejo resident:

“My granddaughter was my reason for going, and we were looking for activities for young children. We ended up at a theater production. We also went to a music activity, and it was at first abstract and then rap music. I guess the emphasis of the music was multicultural, but I don’t know what it had to do with reading.

“During the theater production, a person came on stage as Chicken Little and began by saying, ‘The sky is falling! The sky is falling!’ Another person on stage said, ‘If the sky is falling, it must be due to global warming. Let’s go tell Al Gore.’ I would have thought I had heard incorrectly, but they said it twice. Young children were taking in the performance, and they were absorbing the message of global warming and Al Gore.”

Blog staffers questioned whether the theater production about global warming was a spoof about junk science. The resident responded that it seemed to be a serious portrayal.

City Manager Dennis Wilberg’s Sept. 18 “The Week That Was” filled less than a page, with no mention of Sept. 14-18. It was instead five comments from people who attended the Readers’ Festival on Sept. 12. One attendee complimented the city staff “on all the things you do,” including the “wonderful” Lake Mission Viejo, which is privately owned. Wilberg’s report talks up feedback about the festival, based on a survey conducted during the event. Evidently, three festival workers were assigned the task of recording positive response from attendees. They surveyed 53 participants.

As part of the survey, attendees were asked how they found out about the festival. Some said they read about it in the City Outlook magazine. Readers told this blog a week ago that the Outlook magazine arrived in their mailboxes on Sept. 12, the day of the festival.

With Wilberg’s “the event that was” report focusing on participants who said they had a really good time, the obvious question went unanswered: what did the festival cost Mission Viejo taxpayers?