Next year’s Fourth of July celebration, Wrangell’s most popular holiday, may be in jeopardy – the May 1 deadline to turn in paperwork yielded zero royalty candidates.
It takes a village to put on the fireworks and countless other festivities for the Fourth every year. To offset costs, high school students or recent graduates run as royalty contestants – selling tens of thousands of $1 raffle tickets and running food booths downtown to raise money for the chamber of commerce, which organizes the celebration’s events.
Royalty candidates get to keep a portion of their sales as a reward for their hard work and cash prizes go to the lucky winning ticket holders.
Tommy Wells, chamber of commerce executive director, said he’s hoping candidates will turn in late paperwork. A couple people picked up the required packets from the chamber office, he said, and are perhaps just taking their time filling them out.
But royalty season is fast approaching. Typically, candidates begin selling food and raffle tickets on Memorial Day.
With sales closing July 3, they only have about a month to raise tens of thousands of dollars. Raising enough money requires a lot of advance work, planning, lining up sponsors and arranging a crew and volunteers.
The 2016 royalty contest yielded a record amount of sales by two candidates, totaling $126,408. But since then, sales have been in decline, with only one candidate running the past few years. Ticket sales totaled $53,704 in 2023 and $56,260 in 2022.
Contestants must be at least 14 years old, and they need an adult to sign on as the person in charge, plus a food manager and a finance director, Wells explained. All of the managers must be at least 21 years old.
The chamber has confronted tight finances in recent years amid a downward trend in ticket sales and rising costs. The nonprofit organization reported before last year’s Fourth that its expenses had exceeded revenues the past six years, draining the chamber’s reserves.
The borough assembly last year authorized an additional $25,000 to help the chamber cover its Fourth of July expenses as the organization worked to cut spending and bring in additional sponsors to help cover the costs of many of the events.
The assembly appropriated $22,000 to $27,000 per year to help pay the chamber’s general operating budget in fiscal years 2021, 2022 and 2023, but did not include any direct contribution to the chamber for the budget year that ends June 30.
The borough has not released its draft budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1.
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