CINCINNATI — Former Bunbury Music Festival owner Bill Donabedian won a $56,000 settlement, ending a decade-long legal battle with Cincinnati that led to a change in the city’s admission tax.
“For me personally, I feel vindicated,” said Donabedian, who founded Bunbury and its country music counterpart, the Buckle Up Music Festival. “It’s so easy for government to just run you over if they want to, and I just wasn’t going to let that happen.”
The long controversy began in 2013, just as Bunbury was set to open for its second year at Sawyer Point Park and Yeatman’s Cove. The outdoor music festival for alternative rock performers was quickly becoming popular, and Donabedian believes city officials saw it as a new revenue stream.
He got a letter from the city, warning him that he would have to pay tens of thousands in admission tax based on his ticket sales. At that point, he had already sold more than half of his tickets without collecting the tax.
“Well, I said this is not applicable,” because the city’s municipal code stated the 3% admission tax was only to be collected from events with reserved seating.
Donabedian also founded the MidPoint Music Festival, featuring up-and-coming performers in venues around downtown and Over-the-Rhine, which the city did not ask to pay admission tax.
“My argument back then as well was it's not reserved seating it’s just people in bars standing around … I was saying look, if you read the tax code, this is really, really, unclear,” Donabedian said. “I just felt like I was either met with indifference, contempt or anger.”
Donabedian, who is also the former Fountain Square managing director, tried to plead his case to the city. But the city wouldn’t budge and he paid nearly $100,000 in tax on tickets in 2013 and 2014.
Meanwhile, he said other concerts and events didn’t pay any tax.
He sued the city in 2015, accusing officials of “discriminatory enforcement” and selectively choosing which events and performances are required to pay the 3 percent tax.
The lawsuit bounced from state to federal court, then back to state court over eight years, before finally ending Nov. 15 when the case was dismissed with a settlement.
During that time, city officials admitted to the murkiness of the city’s code in depositions.
Kim Perry, the city’s then admissions tax administrator, testified in her deposition about the code — “It is vague … I can interpret that to mean anything,” according to court documents.
John Walsh, the city’s former treasurer, said in his deposition, “I think some of the language is obscure ... I think some of the wording needs to be cleaned up, made a little bit more clear.”
While the lawsuit was ongoing, Cincinnati City Council quietly voted to change the city’s municipal code on the admissions tax in 2019 for the first time since 1972. The vote removed language in the code specifying that only events offering “seating” were subject to the admissions tax law.
Donabedian believes the city changed its law because of him.
“There’s no question. Because the only piece of that tax code they changed was the one that I brought in question. It was about the reserved seating. Now they pretty much clarified it’s for any event,” Donabedian said.
A city spokesperson declined to comment on the settlement but said the tax brings in an average of $5.7 million each year recently.
But the festivals that Donabedian founded aren’t contributing to that revenue anymore.
Coleman Hell performs at the CVG River Stage during the Bunbury Music Festival on Sunday, June 5, 2016.
He sold Bunbury and Buckle Up to PromoWest Productions in late 2014. The Buckle Up Festival never returned to Cincinnati.
The last live Bunbury performances happened in 2019, and the festival has not returned to Cincinnati.
“It’s getting so expensive, and it’s getting harder and harder to make money and stay in business in this industry,” said Donabedian, who also founded Bellwether Music Festival, a three-day event with camping that was last held at the Ohio Renaissance Festival fairgrounds in 2019.
While the pandemic may have paused concerts in 2020, Donabedian said increased permitting and parking fees, plus overly strict rules and red tape in Cincinnati are discouraging new music festivals from coming here.
“You just felt like you were getting nickeled and dimed over and over again, and those costs really add up,” said Donabedian, who now works as a consultant for Cedar Fair Entertainment which owns and operates water parks, sports destinations and amusement parks such as Kings Island.
“There are a lot of events that have struggled and gone away,” said Donabedian. “I don’t see Bunbury, and definitely not Buckle Up, returning. We’ll see.”
