A major shakeup puts the future of Sand City’s signature event into question.

The 2024 West End Celebration in Sand City might not be the last year the event takes place, but it will be the last year that Steve Vagnini, who’s coordinated it for the last 14 years, will be making it all happen.

And given how much work Vagnini has put into West End over the years – often pulling 10-hour workdays over the weekends in the months before the event, he says, as he was still working his full-time job as county assessor – he’s not sure the event can continue at the $95,000 the city budgeted for its expenses this past year.

Just to break even, he thinks another event promoter would probably require a budget of at least twice that.

Whether the turn of events is the result of one very big misunderstanding with the city isn’t clear – city officials say they’re sorry to see him pull out of the event – but this is how it played out from Vagnini’s perspective. Last October, he presented a proposal to City Council with a budget for the 2024 event adding $5,000 for an intern position “that will begin a succession plan for my ultimate replacement.”

He was planning to retire from putting on the event at some point, he explains, and wanted to make sure he could hand it off to a successor to make the transition seamless. But this year, during the event, Vagnini says he found out from a food vendor that the city was considering finding another event organizer to replace him. The more he asked around, the more he heard the same thing from others.

Vagnini felt – given all the years he devoted to West End – that if true, he should have been the first to hear it.

He finally did hear about it from the City days before an Oct. 1 City Council meeting, when the council was set to consider issuing a request for proposals for coordination of the 2025 West End Celebration. Vagnini attended the meeting and stood in front of the council and read from prepared remarks.

“As anyone that knows me knows, I am passionate about Sand City, the arts and the West End Celebration,” he said. “It is a labor of love that has literally at times consumed my life.”

He added that, with the succession plan he had put into place, he had been prepared to continue in his role “as long as it took to ensure a smooth transition.”

But then Vagnini got to the crux: “Due to the way that this proposal has been handled by the city,” he said, “showing a blatant lack of respect and appreciation for all of my years of commitment… I cannot continue to serve as event coordinator.”

Those words marked the end of an era, 14 years of coordinating the event and 22 years of promoting its music.

City Manager Vibeke Norgaard says she’s grateful to Vagnini and how easy he’s been to work with over the years. Norgaard adds that the RFP wasn’t pre-planned – she’s unsure about what Vagnini heard during the event – but that it was suggested by Councilmember Jerry Blackwelder during a meeting on Sept. 17, and was subsequently placed on the Oct. 1 agenda, given that Vagnini had mentioned his future retirement last fall.

In the meantime, she says, the city is working to put together its RFP. “This is a very important cultural event,” she points out. “We’re going to take some time and carefully draft this.”