Athens City Council will explore the benefits of hiring a seasonal employee to manage and organize Athens’ annual Halloween street party, Councilwoman Bojinka Bishop, D-2nd Ward, said during council committee meetings yesterday.

Bishop will look into defining the position as a contract service or regular city employee and determining the person’s duties.

Hiring an event planner to manage Halloween would ensure that he or she could pay full attention to the event and oversee future changes, said Paige Alost, the executive director of the Athens County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“Once you put a title to it and have someone managing it, people will accept (Halloween) more and not see it as a rogue group of people in charge,” said Jonathan Holmberg of the Athens Clean and Safe Halloween Committee.

Even if the position was filled before the upcoming Halloween, Alost and several council members said the city should not expect to recuperate all of its costs this year. The city recuperated $12,500 in revenue of the total $86,600 spent on Halloween last year.

Councilman Paul Wiehl, D-1st Ward, and Councilman Jim Sands, D- at large, said spending money to save money does not seem like a good strategy to many Athens city residents.

Managing a Web site for Halloween in Athens, organizing volunteers and increasing sponsorship levels are all realistic goals for this Halloween, but not without a concrete plan, said Councilwoman Carol Patterson, D-at large.

Many administrative details, such as to whom the event planner would report and how the city auditor would process Halloween revenue, still need to be considered, said Councilwoman Nancy Bain, D-3rd Ward.

The city has employed an event planner on a part-time, contract basis before, as recently as a few years ago, Bishop said.

The potential position also could serve as a community relations liaison for other events, such as the Memorial Day parade, and explore how the city can make money from other events, Wiehl said.

If the city can claim ownership of the Halloween festival, it can collect royalties by controlling merchandise sales for the event, but the topic of ownership sparked more debate among council members.

“I think we own it already, no matter what we do,” Bain said.

Ohio University students and the Athens Clean and Safe Halloween Committee have proposed three plans for the future of Halloween in Athens, but council members have not decided on any of the three.

The plans propose either keeping the organization the same, increasing the city’s oversight of the event with a city-employed event planner or hiring an outside promoter to organize the street festival.

A key difference between the “status quo” plan and the other two is the ability to eventually gain revenue from Halloween, Alost said. The current structure of Halloween does not provide for opportunities beyond code enforcement citations, vending, parking and transit fees to recuperate the costs of the event.