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Potty Over Here
The unglamorous but crucial job of building the Utah Arts Festival.
By Scott Renshaw

Patrick Burns doesn't really understand why I want to interview him. "My job is not the glamorous one," says the Utah Art Festival's assistant director and technical director. "I figure out where the port-a-potties should go."

That's an accurate statement, as far as it goes—which isn't nearly far enough. Burns' humble understatement notwithstanding, he gets to oversee all of the behind-the-scenes logistical work that allows an estimated 85,000 to 90,000 attendees to enjoy the Utah Arts Festival annually without really noticing all that work. Because if people are noticing, it's probably because something went wrong.

Burns has been in his current position for seven years, but has spent 18 years total with the Arts Festival and 16 years as a full-time employee, working his way up from an internship and also doing publicity work along the way. "People always ask, 'You work for the Arts Festival ... year-round?'" Burns says. "'What do you do the rest of the year?'"

The long answer to that simple question is "a lot," beginning literally from the moment the current year's festival ends. The tear-down of the fencing, stages, booths and other infrastructure takes two days, with the goal of having the surrounding streets—particularly 200 South between the City & County Building and the Library—open by 5 p.m. on the Tuesday after the festival, "We have not missed that deadline since I've been in this position," Burns adds with some understandable pride. "Then we take three or four days off, come back to the office, clean everything up, and start doing the numbers. Part of my duties is to do the annual report: how many people came through the gates, the temperature, profit margin on sales."

That's only the beginning of the administrative side of the post-festival work, which includes presenting the report to the UAF board in August, developing the budget for the next year, then beginning the permitting process with various government entities—the city, the health department, DABC—once the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. "You have to meet with a lot of different departments," Burns says. "Our last meeting is today," he adds on the day we spoke—a day less than three weeks before the festival was set to open. "When you try to plan a party that you have to build a small city for, with all the accompanying infrastructure ..."

Then there's the question of where to place every stage, booth, table and, yes, port-a-potty—a job which in some ways gets easier with the passage of time and certain things continuing as they have been, but which also involves constantly reviewing what could be better logistically, whether for the experience of guests or for the experience of artists, performers and vendors. And while no change is ever going to meet with 100 percent approval, a lot of thought goes into it.

"People asked why we moved the Festival Stage into the sun last year, when it used to be on the grass for years and years and years, in the shade," Burns says. "Well, this stage has maybe five or six performances on it, depending on the day, and the rest of the time it was just sitting in the shade. Meanwhile, 70-plus artists are sitting out in the sun, with patrons trying to shop in the sun. So we moved the artists into the shade, and mostly program the stage at night, after it cools off. We also needed a larger stage for acts like the Utah Symphony, and there just wasn't room on the grass to build a larger stage."

And not every change which seems initially like a great idea works out as planned. Last year, Burns attempted a different organization of many of the artist booths in "pods of four," rather than longer rows, which created more of the envied "corner" positions that always seem to get more visitor traffic. "What I didn't realize," says Burns, "is that patrons, as they're walking around, get confused. They couldn't remember if they'd been to Booth 56 yet, or 47. So this year we're putting them [back] in rows, so people know if they've walked in a straight line."

Examples like that are the ones that visitors and artists might actually notice; other work goes on so invisibly that nobody will notice: the placement of cords that supply electrical power, or where to have artists and vendors load in and load out their supplies. Burns is always considering the impact of the festival's operations on what he refers to repeatedly as "our neighbors," from actual festival venues like The Leonardo to surrounding businesses on the bordering streets. After several years in his current role, and with the festival in the same physical location, certain elements have become simpler in terms of budgeting and in the production schedule—Burns offers the example of, "oh yeah, the plumber's got to come today"—yet there are always new variables, from the weather to construction, like the work on the City & County Building scheduled to begin later this year.

And even simple matters like planning the festival layout based on a to-scale map always seem to throw a few curve balls. "You measure it out, and on the map it shows that there should be 25 feet," Burns says. "Then you go down [to the site] and measure with the wheel, and you try to put up a tent that's 25 feet, and for whatever reason, ... something just doesn't fit. That's kind of a personal goal: Everything just went like the map showed. But it rarely happens."

Everything still does somehow manage to fit, even as the festival's attendance continues to grow. Burns believes that, given some creativity with using the existing venue and getting people to attend earlier, it should be able to hold 100,000 or more. Any additional growth of the physical site, were it necessary, might come from expanding further east, toward the Public Safety Building. "The only concern with that is we use 300 East for our staging area, our tech crew boneyard, our rental crew. We need a place for the ugly stuff to sit. And we try to keep it out of the patron view. What we're searching for is a peak experience, so when people come to UAF, they feel like they're walking into a beautiful park with really high-quality art. ... So we need a place for the ugly stuff to sit so they don't walk into that."

Which brings us back to the location of those port-a-potties, and the decision to remove one of the "pods" of toilets from a location nearer to a festival stage. While the same total number of facilities will still be on the festival grounds, Burns realized that the sound of the doors slamming was interfering with the experience of watching performances. Additionally, Burns says, "To the side of the stage, that road slopes, so they were ... not as steady as we'd like."

It's not glamorous work. But even if you'd rather not think about things like an unsteady port-a-potty, you should be glad that Patrick Burns does.