Unpaid Bills Kill Tet Festival : City Says Sponsor Owes It $52,920

The Vietnamese Tet festival in Little Saigon has been canceled this year because its sponsor still owes the city more than $50,000 in unpaid bills from last year’s celebration, organizers said Friday.

“The city charged us too much money last year,” said an angry Co Pham, president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce. “We can’t afford to pay what (it) charged us.”

The city told chamber officials last August that unless it pays $52,920.23 it owes for use of public facilities and services in last year’s festivities, the organization would not be allowed to have the celebration this year, Pham said Friday.

Hundreds of thousands of people have attended the chamber-sponsored celebration, which includes a parade and carnival, since it began two years ago.

The community will not be entirely without its traditional festive celebration of the Vietnamese new year, which begins Friday in the Chinese lunar calendar. Another organization in the Vietnamese community has come forward to put on its own Year of the Ram festival. Also, the department of student Services at Golden West College in Huntington Beach will hold its annual Tet celebration on campus.

Pham first approached Westminster officials in 1989 with the idea of having a grand-scale Tet festival in the heart of Little Saigon, he said, with the dual intention of promoting a citywide cultural celebration and bringing in more business for the city.

“My goal was to make this festival a tourist attraction to create more business,” he said. “And the city may not understand that.”

“To the City Council, we are a political liability,” Pham said. “They’ve implied to me that if they write off the credit, then their supporters will get angry.”

City officials, however, said they went above and beyond their duty in providing the chamber with their services in last year’s celebration. In fact, they reduced the total bill by 25%, they said.

The city originally billed the chamber $77,226.98 for safety and traffic patrol on a cordoned-off area of Bolsa Avenue between Magnolia and Dillow streets, Deputy City Manager Don Vestal said.

In April, the City Council authorized a 25% reduction in the bill, Vestal said, “in recognition of the value of the festival to the community as a whole.”

Westminster Councilman Frank Fry Jr. said the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce has to meet its financial obligation regardless of what Pham said the festival offers the city.

“If you want to put something on of that caliber and you’re going to bring in 100,000 people, it’s going to take extra (city) people and those hours have to be paid for,” Fry said.

“It brings a lot of publicity to the city,” he added. “Whether or not it brings anything beyond that is hypothetical.”

And in answer to Pham’s accusation that the City Council is denying him a permit for political reasons, Westminster Councilwoman Joy L. Neugebauer said the council’s decision should not be interpreted as anything other than the council members performing their duty.

“I think it should be a community event,” not a city event, Neugebauer said. “And since it does have religious and cultural connotations, I don’t think the city should participate in that any more than we do in other religious festivals.

“It’s an important holiday and I hope it will be very successful,” she added.

The Vietnamese Community Council of Southern California, which will hold a three-day Tet Festival beginning Friday on a 6-acre lot behind 99 Market, a shopping center on Bolsa Avenue, promised that its festival will be even more successful than the chamber’s past efforts.

Even though the festival sponsors have changed, “the spirit of celebrating Tet will be the same,” said Chuyen Nguyen, the council’s general secretary.

“I believe this Tet festival will be larger than the previous two years,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen said that because the community council’s celebration will be held on private property, the cost of facility maintenance and security will be minimal, enabling organizers to put more money into the celebration.

“We’re going to cause a scene this year,” Nguyen said.

Also, in Huntington Beach, an annual Tet celebration will be held at Golden West College next Saturday and Sunday, a school official said.

“We’ve done this annually,” said Tri Nguyen, the festival director. “As far as the students are concerned, if (the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce) can’t have their festival, they can’t have it. We emphasize maintaining a tradition.”

Times staff writer Dave Lesher contributed to this report.