[Kevin Sevcik]

Elgin,

Many regionals are already negotiating hard with venues to get discounted rental fees and all sorts of breaks. I know for a fact that the LSR regional gets a decent break on the fees for the Reliant Arena. Threatening a venue with a boycott is just plain stupid. They do not, in fact, have to accept FIRST's custom or give us discounts or anything. As for buying out a lot, most venues have a set fee for buying the entire parking lot for your event. No estimating how many people are parking there, cause you could be wrong or anyone off the street could wander in and park at that point. The other option in some places is buying parking tags for every team and distributing them. In which case you still don't have free parking for the public. Both of these options can get very expensive. In the $10K range. So if you happen to have $10K laying around, feel free to donate it to the event of your choice to cover parking. Otherwise just put the extra $100 or so in your team's budget to cover the parking fees and let the regional planning committees worry about the already difficult enough task of pulling off a regional as cost effectively as possible.