The Crafty Folk Craft Bazaar, a staple of Durango’s Christmas festivities for 50 years, was abruptly canceled last weekend after rumors – or miscommunication – led vendors to believe the city would charge steep fees to sell their wares.
Organizer Mary Beth Torres, who took over the event from her mother, said she and others heard about the requirement secondhand on Nov. 18 – just four days before the bazaar was set to take place at Durango-La Plata Senior Center.
“I found out … that there are going to be some new enforced requirements of all the vendors that we’ve never heard of before, and so we don’t have enough time to get those,” she said. “There’s a tax ID number and the city tax and the state tax thing that we all have to have before we can vend anything. And so it’s been canceled because of that.”
Torres said she didn’t hear directly from the city. Instead, Senior Center Director Vicki Maestas told her a city employee had relayed the new requirement.
Organizers said they were told each vendor must purchase a $105 business license, but the city said that figure overstates what is actually required.
Vendors can obtain an event license by submitting a one-time application fee of $30 and a $25 license fee, allowing participation in up to 15 single-day events per year, according to an email from city spokesman Tom Sluis. He was unsure where the $105 figure may have originated.
“They (Vicki Maestas) heard from someone at the city,” Torres said. “That’s all we know.”
The event typically features a few dozen local craftspeople – what longtime vendor Karen Preston called “cottage vendors” – who pay $35 for a table.
Torres said most vendors make only modest sales.
“There are years where you make nothing – I mean, you don’t even make the table fee back,” she said. “Other years you’re doing OK – $100, $200, sometimes a little more. It’s just mostly for fun. We’re not making our mortgage payments or buying fancy new cars or new jewelry or whatever.”
This year, 23 vendors had already signed up to sell homemade crafts and small gift items. Only a handful already held business licenses, organizers said.
The bazaar also moved to a new location this year. For decades it had been held at Summit Church, but construction and an increasingly busy event schedule forced the group to move to the Senior Center, Preston said.
Organizers said the last-minute news about fees left no time to contact vendors, assess their willingness to pay or help them complete the required paperwork.
“It wasn’t so much that they’re doing it, it’s that they did it so last-minute and gave us no time to see how everybody felt about paying it and going ahead with it,” Preston said.
Sluis said the city recently updated its code, and staff members have been reaching out to event organizers and hosts to inform them of changes, which is likely why Maestas received a call.
“That update to Chapter 13-2 clarifies and updates when business licenses are required,” Sluis said. “We’ve been making a lot of changes to the code and updating the code … everything from sales tax collections to building and electrical code updates. It’s part of a general modernization.”
On Thursday, the city issued a news release clarifying that sales tax must be collected and proper licenses must be obtained when sales occur at events.
The release said all events and vendors must be licensed and collect sales tax, regardless of the size or nature of the event.
Fortunately for Durango’s enterprising youths, the city will waive license requirements for child-run lemonade stands and bake sales, Sluis said.
“There’s a lot of ways this flow chart runs in terms of who needs a license and who doesn’t,” he said. “There’s no hard and fast rule.”
Sluis said the broader goal is consistency – creating a “level playing field” so even small or occasional vendors follow the same tax rules as businesses.
How that works in practice, though, is open to discussion and feedback, he said.
“We don’t want to have a situation where people are paying more in fees and taxes than they would collect on the sale of an item,” Sluis said. “The goal is to help people understand the playing field.”
Sluis said it is still unclear how the bazaar organizers received the information or from whom.
“I still don’t know who talked to who,” he said. “From a customer-service perspective, we’re trying to figure out how we can improve this. We don’t know when the organizers let us know they were having an event, whether they communicated anything to the vendors, or what conversations occurred. There are a lot of unknowns at this point.”
jbowman@durangoherald.com
