Spencer Harding, head of brewing operations at Riverside Brewing, pours one of the company's micro brews for beer goers during the Mars Brew Fest Saturday. Harold Aughton/Special to the Eagle
MARS — Brown Paper Tickets, the online ticketing company that owed Mars Borough $25,000 in revenue from the 2022 Mars Brew Fest, said the owed funds would be paid to the borough this week.
At a Mars borough council meeting on Monday, Mayor Gregg Hartung said that the borough had been officially notified by the company Oct. 12 that the missing $25,000 would be deposited within the next week.
“They said that they would be processing the check, and they would put it into our bank, and it might take three or five days to clear for that amount,” Hartung said. “We’re hoping that making it public and doing some things to put pressure on helped us to get the $25,000 to us from the Brew Fest. We’ll see at the end of the week if we have it. Hopefully, we will.”
At the previous Mars borough council meeting Oct. 4, Hartung explained that Seattle-based Brown Paper Tickets company, which has handled online ticket sales for the Brew Fest for the past three years, is currently under scrutiny for owing money to a number of events across the country.
Borough administration first realized there was an issue when funds were not delivered to the borough’s bank account two weeks after the Brew Fest in June 2022.
The borough has been in communication with the state Attorney General’s office in the state of Washington to discuss options for receiving the funds and has also filed with the Federal Trade Commission.
Hartung said the borough told Brown Paper Tickets that they had gone public about the issue, and hopes that bringing the problem up in public helped.
“We’re hoping that because it was an official sort of reply, we’re thinking pretty positively about it showing up this week,” Hartung said. “They have an account system where you can track your account, and now it’s showing that there has been money put into an account in their system. Hopefully it will get transferred to us (soon).”
The Mars Brew Fest is an annual gathering benefiting the borough’s Mars New Year celebration, an event held every two years to celebrate the new year on the planet Mars and promote STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math).
Some tickets for the event were sold online through Brown Paper Tickets, and some were sold in person. The missing $25,000 made up a little more than half of the total proceeds from the Brew Fest. Hartung indicated that the borough would be looking for a new company to handle online tickets sales next year.
