Poetry festival brings in additional funds

The 16 $2,500 Heritage Club memberships sold for the Cowboy Poetry & Music Festival made the difference in the inaugural event's bottom line.

Genoa Town Manager Sheryl Gonzales said preliminary accounting shows the town and the Carson Valley Arts Council will split at least $41,832 from the event.

In all, the event brought in $167,642 and cost $125,809 to put on.

An additional $8,000 is expected from a Nevada Commission on Tourism grant.

The town and the council each put in $15,000 seed money to put on the first event.

Ticket sales were a quarter of what promoters budgeted, with only 243 two-day passes and 577 day passes sold out of the hoped-for 2,500 tickets in each category.

Headliners tended to have the best turnouts according to information released at the Genoa Town Board on Tuesday night, with Sourdough Slim pulling down 78.75 percent; Waddie Mitchell and Don Edwards having 86.33 percent attendance; and Lacey J. Dalton, David John & the Comstock Cowboys having 85.9 percent attendance.

The two lowest attended events were the dances scheduled opposite the headliners' performances on Friday and Saturday night.

Genoa House Inn owner Keith Corban congratulated the town board on a successful event.

"As someone who was in Genoa through the weekend, I heard many complimentary comments, including that Genoa put on a better show in its first year than Winnemucca has in 10 years."

However, Corban pointed out that the Cowboy Poetry Web site only listed host hotels, which left out smaller innkeepers.

"We only have three rooms," he said. "The lowest requirement for a host hotel was more room nights than we have."

He urged Genoa to promote the town on its Web site during the event next year.