Business
Services
Business Services manages
various on-playa functions that involve contact with outside vendors to
support the Burning Man community: the center camp Café, ice sales/CampArctica,
and the staff commissary. Similarly, we support other Burning Man departments
by negotiating and managing vendor contracts for services including office
buildings, golf carts, medical shelters and cots, porta-potties and the
Gerlach shuttle.
Because of the remoteness of the event and the harsh conditions of our environment,
it is often difficult to identify vendors who are willing to work with us
at all, putting their equipment and sometimes their employees on the playa
in the middle of our inspired lunacy and challenging weather. We send out
RFP's (requests for proposals/price quotes) to appropriate potential vendors
for all large contracts well in advance of the event. It is quite typical
to receive no more than one or two responses from a pool of 15 possible
service providers, even with assiduous telephone follow-up and lots of coddling.
Buildings are a case in point. In 2001, we needed 20 temporary office building-type
structures to run the city. (Think of the 8-window Box Office as you entered
the city, the building used by REMSA as their on-playa "hospital",
the Burning Man Information Radio (BMIR) broadcast center, the building
used by the Rangers for radio dispatch and so forth). We own one such building
and the DPW built three additional buildings (for medical north and south
and the bus depot). For the remaining 16 we were at the mercy of the temporary
office building industry, which rents buildings for a minimum of one month
(or even three months) and charges hefty transportation fees to deliver
them by specially-outfitted semi trucks to the Black Rock Desert. In addition,
because even temporary buildings must meet state safety inspection criteria,
we must also pay for installation, tie-down, stair rentals, insurance, cleaning
fees, etc. etc. etc. The end result is that securing a building for use
that is adequately sealed and air-conditioned to allow us reliably to run
computers, radios or other electronic equipment in a "dust-free"
(!) environment can have a gross cost of upwards of $3,000 PER BUILDING.
(Even at that price we consider ourselves lucky to be able to get what we
need.) Each year we work through the rent vs. buy vs. build decision for
buildings. We'll be doing the same exercise again in 2002.
Golf carts are also a difficult situation. You likely saw various staff
members driving golf carts before and during the event assisting Theme
Camps with placement, providing quick response to medical calls, delivering
coolers of water to work crews, etc. Golf carts are not typically built
to run on a cracked-mud playa. We have been very grateful for our close
relationship with Sierra Golf Cart and their willingness to work with
us, to the extent possible, to retrofit golf carts to survive the desert
conditions. A flatbed trailer, however, fits a maximum of only 10 golf
carts and we are charged per-mile round trip for pickup and delivery.
Consequently, a cart that would cost you $35 per day to rent in the city
costs dramatically more in the Black Rock Desert when you factor in the
$720 per-load delivery fee. Here again, the "rent vs. buy" decision
is affected by our limited ability to store carts through the winter under
protected conditions, and by our constant search to identify the perfect
"playa transport vehicle(s)".
The Gerlach shuttle
service provides a different type of challenge. Because we operate on
public roads, our shuttle carrier must have the appropriate commercial
license and insurance to run this sort of service in Nevada. The local
"casino bus"-type operators, however, would be a very uncomfortable
cultural fit for our event. We have been thrilled with our partnership
with The Green Tortoise, which has been able to save us the cost of transporting
the shuttle buses to the playa by using those same buses to transport
non-car-driving citizens to our event. To accommodate those riders who
would otherwise have access to the buses for storage, relaxation, sleeping,
etc. during the day, we provide the Tortoise camp with a container for
storage of their passengers' goods and a shade structure for lounging.
Gardner Kent, the founder of the Tortoise, is a kindred spirit and a particular
fan of Burning Man (it's a mutual admiration society). As any of you who
have ridden the Shuttle will attest, the Tortoise drivers are perfectly
culturally suited to the task of transporting our motley community back
and forth between our playa home and the pay phones and cash registers
of Gerlach and Empire.
Finally: POTTIES. As our community is well aware, we ended the 2000 event
with a particular challenge. Based on the amount of trash thrown into
the potties that year, we were no longer welcome to dump our waste in
the Reno disposal facility. In addition we were put on notice by our vendor
that the trash situation (and several other factors) made it impossible
for him to service the large number of porta-pottie units we required
to a reasonable standard of cleanliness. (That year more than 50% of his
employees quit on site after spending all day and night pulling refuse-covered
trash out of potties and hoses by hand -- with only playa camping facilities
for cleaning up and sleeping). The Burning Man organization made solving
the pottie problem a very high priority for 2001, with two main foci:
(1) Pottie placement and servicing logistics and (2) No Moop in the Poop.
To improve servicing logistics, we fixed a number of problems from previous
years. First we doubled the number of potties in each bank and set them
up so that a truck could pull off the road to the middle of a bank. This
enabled the workers to shut down and service half of that bank's toilets,
then re-open the clean half and service the remaining half, without forcing
the line of people waiting to go elsewhere. This doubled the cleaning
team's efficiency and solved the line and overuse problems prevalent in
previous years when an entire bank was shut down during servicing, causing
folks from that area to overload the neighboring bank.
In 2000 the 5 mph speed limit and scattered toilet placement made the
servicing truck routes slow and inefficient. We solved this by placing
all pottie banks on one circular route, so that the trucks could move
easily from bank to bank with a minimum of wasted navigation time. The
vendor also added more large tanker trucks to improve the efficiency of
waste transport from BRC to Reno, where the waste facility agreed to accept
our waste on probation: one more problem and were would be OUT. Splitting
off RV servicing to a separate vendor ensured that we would not again
be in the position of having to trade off these important services against
one another. In March, Business Services turned over to DPW the critical
responsibility for nailing down the details and making sure everything
really happened as planned
To address the trash issue, we established a community-wide PR and education
campaign. Before the December 2000 Town Meeting, we created the initial
slogan "If it wasn't in your body, don't put it in the pottie"
to begin to get out the word. In addition to the pottie presentation at
the Town Meeting, we placed an early article in the JackRabbit Speaks
to inform the community about the problem, and invited interested citizens
to join our
pottie
discussion list on the topic. This list provided an active forum for
suggestion of possible solutions and educational avenues. The list generated
hundreds of signs placed at each toilet bank, public service announcements
for the radio stations, a "Pooping Man" logo (seen on t-shirts,
dust kerchiefs, etc.), lots of activity on many other community email
lists and discussion groups, and more bad puns than you could possibly
imagine. The Black Rock Gazette team jumped in with an article in the
Gate edition, the Greeters added a crash course on pottie etiquette to
their welcoming spiel, and the signs on Gate Road reminded incoming citizens
of what (not) to do. The final result renewed our faith in our community:
when people are educated about what is needed, we ARE capable of adjusting
our behavior to make our city run smoothly (and our potties stay clean).
