Disney Extortion!

[Nate Smith]

Originally posted by Michael Krass

Your $4000 entry fee is assessed irrespective of the size of your team. Just as your initial $5000 does nothing to cover any travel costs that may be associated with attending a regional, the same is true of Nationals, of course. This, I believe, is the most fair way of handling this. I'd much prefer it over being charged an entry fee based on your team size. . . that would, after all, very effectively limit how many students this program involves.

I don't know FIRST's budget offhand, but I feel that I can pretty safely say that very, very little of the entry fees are passed on the regional developers. There are folks around here that know more about that than I, though. So, it's really up to those charged with planning the events that need to somehow gather enough funds to do it. If Disney chooses to cover those costs by assessing a small fee, that's fine with me.

A few VERY good points were made in this post, and based on the knowledge I have from working on both sides of the coin(team member & event staff) the past few years, I would like to add a few things. As was mentioned above, there are two distinct types of funding needed to attend any FIRST event. First is the registration fee, which is charged the same amount regardless of team size or any other aspect. The money generated through these registration fees gets pooled to cover FIRST's expenses for the entire year, not just during the event season. After all, with the promary source of income for FIRST being these registration fees(I know they have grants and other funding coming in, but I have a feeling 4000 per team per event makes up a substantial part of their yearly budget,) part of it has to go to FIRST as a organization for purposes such as payroll, travel expenses, insurance, and recurring charges(electric bill, etc). When all is said and done, I would be surprised if even half of the amount gathered through entry fees is even available went toward actual event expenses. So, as you can see, it is not realistic to ask FIRST to spread that money out even further, without raising the registration fee.

Also, Michael mentioned the amount of money that actually goes toward the events themselves. While I don't know the numbers exactly for Disney, I have a rough idea of the numbers for a regional event. Last year, one of the regionals had 42 teams competing. Assuming the unlikely event that 100% of the registration fees went to the costs of this event, that would be 42x4000=$168,000. However, if my memory serves me correctly, the total amount for the event needed was $250,000, and the local committee was instructed to raise half of that through local sponsorship. Meaning that only $125,000/42=$2976 of each team's event fee went directly to the costs of the event. Note that this does not include the extra costs for transportation for the FIRST staff to the event, as well as the shipping costs to get the field and other equipment to the site(as far as I know).

Now, one thing to remember about this is that these figures are for a regional event, where all of the infrastructure(building, etc.) is already in place. The fact that EVERYTHING, from the bathrooms, to the chairs, to the lighting, to the electricity, has to be brought to us at Disney must cause this costs to skyrocket. As some people have mentioned in this post, the costs of Nationals to FIRST and Disney have always been offset by an extra charge figured into the cost of the hotel/park package. However, many teams have found, in looking for the best deal, it was cheaper to book outside of the provided packages, as any other booking did not include the expenses of the event itself. So, many teams have booked with the better deal, perhaps not thinking about what that additional cost may have gone toward. Now, the uproar seems to be, IMHO, that these teams, who have enjoyed the luxury of having the better deal for seemingly the same package these past few years, are in essence being "caught," and being asked to pay their fair share again. With the economy in a downturn like it is now, was it the best time to start this policy? Perhaps not, but it also needs to be kept in mind that may have been the exact reason it was started.

Flame away if you must, but I personally feel that the event fee, as I have stated many times over on this board, is the most fair way to handle the rising costs of the National Competition. The notification of FIRST's intent with this fee was made very early in the season, so teams could plan accordingly. While I'm not claiming that makes the money any easier to come across, it seems you were given fair warning, and at this point, many of these posts are repeating what was said previously, and arguing over something that most likely will not be changed this year. Therefore, unless clarification is asked regarding something I have said in this post, this will be my last in this thread. I'm sure that in the time I have spent writing this, everything else has been marked as read, so it should be interesting getting to see what else is new on the board since I was here yesterday afternoon.