"Serenity pays price for scalping dispute: Lack of ban fuels chaos at ticket market," by John Moore, Denver Post, February 11, 2002.
(Article available from Lexis-Nexis.)
SALT LAKE CITY - A long-simmering feud between the city of Salt Lake and its Police Department over the lack of ticket-scalping laws is being exposed daily at the Olympics.
The city has repeatedly refused to enact a scalping law, although it requires scalpers to be licensed. The police, who have wanted an outright ban for years, don't feel much like enforcing the permitting requirement now that hundreds of scalpers from out of town and overseas have descended to make big money on the Olympics.
The scalpers are all over Salt Lake City, but they have clustered particularly at a city-sponsored merchandise mart for licensed scalping, making it difficult for legitimate customers to get inside.
'We're going to get a grip on this,' promised John Sittner, director of Olympic planning for Salt Lake City.
But he won't get much help from police. 'In the bigger picture of law enforcement, it really isn't practical during the Olympics, or in the best interest of overall public safety, to have our people tied up in a process that would be incredibly manpower-intensive,' said Craig Gleason, a spokesman for the Salt Lake City Police Department.
'There are other things we need to worry about, and to me, writing tickets to 15 British scalpers isn't one of them,' he said.
'It's a prioritization thing,' officer Perry Beauchaine added. 'But that may change when the mayor sees this.'
What the mayor would have seen this weekend was chaos and anger at the Walker Center, the market for licensed scalpers. Outside, hundreds of unlicensed ticket sellers tried to lure customers before they could make it inside. On Saturday, Sittner stood on a planter threatening the unlicensed hawkers with citations, but police said they had no real intention of backing his threat.
'If they wanted us to enforce it, they should have come to us with an ordinance six months ago, like we asked,' officer Joe Schirle said.
Although reselling tickets at any agreed-upon price is legal in Salt Lake City, the sellers must obtain a peddler's license, about a two-week process that includes a hearing and a background check. Selling without a license is punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a $ 1,000 fine, though most offenders receive only a $ 100 to $ 300 fine.
Two scalpers from Atlanta said they tried to obtain licenses when they arrived Thursday in Salt Lake City. But they were told the city in January imposed a moratorium on new licenses until after the Olympics.
'The City Council is concerned with what happened at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, where lots of people were selling all kinds of things without permits,' assistant city attorney Larry Spendlove said. 'They wanted to have some control.'
Control was nowhere to be found Saturday outside the Walker Center. The system is such a joke, Schirle said, that once legal scalpers inside run out of tickets, they simply go outside and buy more from the illegal scalpers. 'That's what happens when you don't have clear laws,' he said.
Inside or out, ticket sellers are finding buyers. One legal scalper was asking $ 1,300 for a ticket to the gold-medal hockey game, which has a face value of $ 425. A ticket to the women's figure skating long program, with a face value of $ 375, is going for $ 550.
A BBC journalist estimated 150 British scalpers have come to Salt Lake City. Sittner is offering them an expedited, two-day permitting process that still includes a background check, but police say that violates the moratorium.
But one irate British scalper assailed Sittner on Saturday for cracking down on a practice that is legal and for charging a $ 750 permit fee.
'You're not going to be happy until you get $ 750 out of every one of us, you wretch!' he yelled.
'How can he deny us the right to do something that is legal?' he asked. 'The whole point of a capitalist society is to make money. That's why we fought the Russians in the Cold War - to make money!'