If that hooks you, you may want to scroll down her page a bit and watch her take on the Wedding-Industrial Complex as well.

(Geez, I love her.)
 

I put "outdoor" in quotes because the only way to keep the ice frozen was to stick the rink inside a giant tent, which kinda negates the whole point of an outdoor ice rink in a riverside city park, doesn't it? No riverfront vista, no soaring views of the causeway, just boring white canvas walls. And it's only 3,300 square feet, which is one-sixth the size of the Space Coast Iceplex's 20,000 square-foot rink in Rockledge... which, coincidentally, is at-most a 15-minute drive from Cocoa Village. If you're going to pay $10 in admission and skate rental fees to go ice-skating indoors, wouldn't you rather drive a little further for a rink that's six times bigger with a better snack bar, superior facilities, and actual restrooms instead of Port-a-Johns, all for the exact same price? I would.

The city budgeted $140,000 of taxpayer money to pay for this boondoggle, and later had to up the budget by another $15,500 because they forgot that they'd have to hire someone to manage the rink on-site. (Bravo!) They hoped to offset that total cost of $155,500 through admission fees, skate rentals, a concession stand, and advertising from local business sponsors. But apparently, Cocoa City Councilwoman Pat McCrary wasn't too worried about that back in November, as she told Florida Today that the city doesn't break even on its Fourth of July fireworks display each year either.

Uh, Pat? There's a difference: people actually want to come to the Fourth of July fireworks show.

Contrast that with this silly "outdoor" skating rink. The initial estimate from the city was that 18,000 people would show up during the rink's six-week run, from Thanksgiving through January 4th. We've gone through five of those six weeks, with eight days to go. And how many people have actually gone into this dreary tent and skated on this undersized rink?

Try 5,800 over the past five weeks.

To meet the estimate of 18,000 skaters, they'll need to get another 12,200 people to show up in this final week after getting less than half that number for the previous five weeks. If that actually happens, it probably means hell has frozen over too. They're counting on attendance spiking now that school is out, but school has been out for the past week already anyway, and that doesn't seem to have helped attendance much so far.

And while the city doesn't directly break even from the Fourth of July, the economic impact of the ginormous crowds who flock to Cocoa Village for the fireworks display is nothing short of staggering. That's buckets of cash for all of the local businesses there, which leads to higher tax revenue for the city on the back-end. I guarantee you, the city makes a profit from the Fourth of July when you factor in the economic impact and the resulting boost to the tax-base of Cocoa Village. Compared with the measly attendance at this joke of an ice rink, it's not even close.

But hey, at $10 a pop, 5,800 skaters means $58,000. Cocoa spent a total of $155,500 in taxpayer money on this thing, so that's just $97,500 to go to break even. Add in concession stand revenue and local sponsorships, and maybe, just maybe, they can still break even. But I'm not optimistic, because they're going to need a big spike in rink attendance during this final week to get there.

Unless a miracle happens in the next week, we need to give this stupid idea the cold shoulder next Christmas.