My wife and I just got back from the boat parade/fireworks show on the Delaware River. Nice show, maybe 100 shells of different sorts. I suppose I have seen bigger shows, but it was nice. It was nice to be on the river int he cool of the evening too.
How much do you think it costs to hire someone to put on your standard municipal fireworks show?
Here’s a random article from a random county in [checks article] Illinois.
http://highlandpark.patch.com/articles/how-much-did-you-and-your-neighbors-spend-on-fireworks#comment_3929299
I can’t vouch for it’s accuracy, I have no idea who wrote it or who the sources are. I just googled ‘Milwaukee “cost of fireworks”’ and that came up.
We have HUGE fireworks displays put on by private festivals and I was trying to find those, but this came up first and since it’s public and it appears to be more what you’re looking for. The ones I was aiming for I think are much, much more expensive (Festa Italiana and Summerfest’s Big Bang).
Here’s something reputable. Town meeting minutes from a city nearby me where they set the city fireworks budget at 13,000-15,000. The company they’re using is the same company that does the fireworks shows for the two festivals I mentioned above.
The numbers in Joey’s references look like the ones I’ve seen. Publicly funded shows are often done for lower prices than privately funded ones. The operators just make less profit from the shows. A municipality may reduce costs by using their fire dept. and emergency services to meet safety regulations. Depending on local law, those services would have to be paid as part of a private show. I think in some cases the munipality assumes part of the liability for the show.
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Help fight my geographical ignorance. Is the Delaware River in Qatar or Saudi Arabia? I keep forgetting. 
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I just saw a news report yesterday about a town here in MN where the citizens are upset because the city paid $18,000 to put on their annual fireworks. (The show and the town festival are usually funded by donations, but they didn’t get enough money this year.)
Our town publishes the cost in the local rag - it’s between $13K in lean years when you get a sort of short show, and it’s been as high as $22K in good years when it seems to go on forever and the finally will leave you blind and deaf.
I suspect the reason they report the cost is that the majority of the $s come from local businesses who are prominently mentioned in the press as sponsors. I suspect they want you to know in a good year just how generous they are, and in a bad year that they support the community through good times and bad.
Nothing wrong with that in my opinion.
No there isn’t. That pattern shows in these parts too. Businesses increase their contributions when the municipality has to cut back. They seem to realize more than the government how important public entertainment is in bad economic conditions.
Thank you all. Not at all excessive for say a funeral then. (That would give them something to talk about!)