The city has answered a records request about WaterFire with two documents, and the paper has read both, which is more than can be said for the documents, which do not appear to have read each other.

The first is a single page titled "WaterFire Overtime — APRA Working Summary." It lists every lighting from January 2025 through August 14 of this year, twenty-three of them, and beside each the number of Parks Department employees who worked overtime that night, their hours, and an estimated cost. The cost basis, in the document's own words, is the actual overtime wage plus fringe; event billing rates are not used. So this is what it cost the city, not what the city would charge anyone.

The total is 536.25 hours and $21,637.10. A full lighting runs the department between $460 and $2,400. A basin lighting runs $400 to $760. A "Starts at Sunset" lighting on the bridge — two employees, eight and a half hours — costs $308.30, and it cost $308.30 in May of last year, and $308.30 again that July, and $308.30 again this July, to the penny. Whatever else is uncertain in municipal finance, the city now knows what it pays for a sunset.

The second document is the signed 2026 Partnership Agreement between the city, through the mayor's office, and WaterFire, a nonprofit on Valley Street. Under it the city pays WaterFire one hundred thousand dollars as an annual advance. In return WaterFire agrees to produce between eight and twenty-six lightings and to provide public safety for them — police, fire and private security — "the details of which will be determined by the City," at a cost not to exceed one hundred thousand dollars. The city may audit WaterFire's books. The city may terminate the agreement at any time for any reason. The term ended June 30.

Read together: the city sends a hundred thousand dollars to Valley Street so that Valley Street can pay for police details, whose details the city decides. The money leaves City Hall, is briefly a grant, and returns as detail pay. The overtime on the first document does not appear in the second document at all. Parks is paid separately, by the city, for the same nights.

Two absences. The summary covers Parks. When this paper's publisher asked the mayor's press office in August who absorbs cleanup after a lighting, the answer named two departments, Parks and Public Works. The release names one. And the request's closing note, unprompted, gave the street-sweeping figure for this Fourth of July: $1,070, against $724.81 the year before.

The paper does not allege that any of this is improper. The paper observes that it is documented, that the two documents were released together, and that no one at either end of Valley Street has yet been asked to add them up.

— N. A.