By Rob Holbert Managing Editor

The concert business must be pretty tough, judging by what’s gone on around here lately. Why just last week, the Zewtopia II music festival was cancelled after shifty promoter Frank Giglio apparently didn’t pay any of the bands to show up. Ooops!

Giglio’s also had to cancel several other concerts recently, the latest being Blue Oyster Cult/Foghat, which I’m sure disappointed leather-wearing grannies across the region. You can read more about Giglio and his shenanigans further back in this fine publication, so I’ll move on.

The second failed would-be promoter is our own Mobile County Commission President Juan Chastang. Unlike Giglio, Chastang’s music didn’t fail because of chronically absent fundage. Nope, Juan has the bread to throw a show, and he made it happen. The only problem is he did it with tax money. Ooops part deux.

If you missed the story in the last Lagniappe, a recap might be necessary. It seems Chastang and local promoter Allen Horn cooked up a plan to put on a concert, ostensibly to raise money for United Cerebral Palsy and another charity called Team Focus. That sounds like a good idea until you get back to what I said in the first sentence of this column – the concert business is tough.

Horn and Chastang’s plan was for Juan to give UCP $50,000 from his big ol’ pot of discretionary money, which they would turn around and give to Horn, who would turn around and give it to a performer named Ciara, who would sing and gyrate before thousands and thousands of adoring fans. This would generate not only the original 50 large for UCP, but thousands more for the two charities. The beauty of this would be that UCP would still have its original $50,000 to spend on some other hair-brained scheme, er, I mean fundraising idea.

Unfortunately, though, the concert business is tough. Just ask Frank Giglio, he couldn’t even get people to buy tickets to see Foghat. Foghat! C’mon, they sing “Slow Ride” and, I’m sure, several other songs. If you can’t sell tickets to Foghat – well, that’s a tough biz. By the way, I’d love to know what the heck a Foghat is. But I digress.

So a funny thing happened on the way to UCP scoring big with the Ciara concert. Nobody showed up. We’re not really sure where the people were. The only thing we know for sure is they weren’t at a Foghat/Blue Oyster Cult Show. Only a couple of thousand folks forked over the cash to see Ciara, so – poof! – the 50K disappeared in a flash. So instead of helping a single child with cerebral palsy, $50,000 went into the pocket of a rich performer and rode out of town on a tour bus.

Oh, I suppose the money did benefit someone. After all, Juan Chastang’s name mysteriously ended up on the tickets, the radio and a Web site as being the show’s presenter. That might help his snowball’s-chance-in-hell bid for election next year. And maybe the money helped Ciara. And I like to think maybe, just maybe, Ciara gave some of that money to Foghat, since they must be completely starving to death, since Frank Giglio cancelled their show.

The truly amazing part of this sad tale, though, is just how upset Juan Chastang gets when anyone has anything bad to say about this ridiculous pissing away of public funds. Instead of hanging his head and saying “I’m a complete idiot. I just wanted to be a big shot in front of Foghat, um, I mean Ciara,” Chastang actually thinks people are out to get him.

When I called him to ask about this mess, his response was to fly into a rage and accuse fellow Commissioner Stephen Nodine of somehow orchestrating this. Chastang reiterated his accusations the following day during a public commission work session.

I suppose on some level Juan is right. Others do share in some of the blame. His fellow commissioners probably should have asked exactly what was going to happen to the money, and the county administrator and attorney should have known what was up. UCP should never have even been within a mile of such a dumb plan. But 95.3 percent of the blame is Chastang’s. He gambled with taxpayer money and lost, most likely just to try to get his name out as some kind of hip promoter-type.

It’s hard to feel too sorry for Chastang since he has absolutely no business being a county commissioner in the first place. He was appointed by the governor when Sam Jones became mayor and was picked by politically connected people locally who wanted a black Republican in District 1. The only problem was Chastang’s house was in another district and he had to come up with some very dubious scenario whereby he actually lived in a glorified shed with a padlock on the door in order to qualify.

Oh, and let’s not forget that years ago, Juan ran into some trouble as a Mobile Police Officer after he allegedly tried to help a suspect bribe a fellow officer. He was suspended from the force for that and later resigned. Why anyone would put Chastang in charge of money is absolutely dumfounding.

It’s probably too much to ask someone of Chastang’s low caliber to dole out $300,000 in discretionary “education” funds each year without attempting to skirt propriety. The fact our commissioners have $900,000 annually in discretionary spending is another discussion altogether. Glancing through a list of these donations for the last year, there are many that look just fine on paper.

For example, Chastang gave another $50,000 to The Chid Advocacy Center just this year. Nodine dropped $45,000 on the Kiwanis Club for Langan Park and Mike Dean spent $50,000 with the O’Rourke PTA. If we’d never heard the “Behind the Music” story of the UCP donation, it wouldn’t exactly jump out at anyone.

So unless the practice of doling out nearly a million bucks a year in discretionary cash is stopped, we’re pretty much left having to trust the three people doing the doling. Apparently, that can also be pretty tough business.

Rob Holbert is Lagniappe managing editor. Contact him at rholbert@lagniappemobile.com.

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