When the Fifolet Halloween Festival comes to Baton Rouge each year, residents expect a haunted ball, costume donations for the city’s children and a parade of spookily-decorated floats streaming through downtown.
But organizers fear the 2025 parade, which rolls for its 15th year on Saturday, Oct. 18, might be the last one they can afford to stage.
“We’re really concerned,” said Kelley Stein, co-founder and chief financial officer of 10/31 Consortium, which hosts the parade. “I mean, we got it covered this year OK, but we just don’t know what’s going to happen for next year. We are preparing ourselves for this to be our last parade.”
The new financial pressure comes from a change in Baton Rouge Police Department policy surrounding event security.
Specifically, organizers are now expected to pay labor costs for the officers who block off streets and provide security at events. Before 2025, when BRPD took a $9 million hit to its budget, the department performed those duties free of charge.
In July, the Cortana Kiwanis canceled this year’s Christmas Parade, citing growing security costs from the city-parish.
Stein said BRPD quoted organizers a price of roughly $13,600 to pay for the parade security, which covers the extra-duty salaries of the officers needed to block off about 20 downtown intersections.
In the event’s 14 previous years, that cost had been zero.
At Fifolet’s annual meeting in July, board members presented the total operating budget for 2025 as $62,000.
Stein said 10/31 Consortium has broken even each year, with no money to carry onto the next, since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The organization’s income is sourced through krewe dues, parade entries, charitable donations and business sponsors, Stein said, but the picture is a little more complicated.
Krewe dues are only $31 per person and total less than $400 a year. Stein said parade entries have dropped from the 60 or so she’d see before 2020. This year, she expects less than 25.
Donations are usually limited to the charity side of Fifolet and can’t be spent on parade or Halloween ball expenses.
A little less than half of Fifolet’s total budget goes toward its charitable pursuit, which Stein describes as the “Halloween version of Toys for Tots,” and mainly involves costume giveaways.
Over the past 15 years, the group has given away more than 6,000 costumes to children in the Greater Baton Rouge area. Otherwise, those children “don’t have costumes to wear on costume day at school. They don’t have costumes to go trick-or-treating in,” she said.
The other hurdle for Fifolet is a busy fall event calendar that often splits sponsors and parade attendees between many events.
The city-parish is loath to let any organization host an event during an LSU home football game, which would stretch law enforcement thin. That leaves groups to schedule their events on top of each other in the few free fall weekends.
According to Stein, events like the Ogden Park Prowl, the Baton Rouge Maker Faire, two 5K runs and Southern University’s homecoming game against Prairie View A&M are all happening next weekend on Saturday.
“There are a lot of challenges with Halloween,” Stein said. “We have been up to that challenge, and we have been fighting hard for 15 years to overcome these challenges, but our participation has not gotten back up since COVID. And now on top of that we have this $13,600 for police.”
No exact science to event costs
For Baton Rouge Police Chief Thomas Morse, much of 2025 has been spent finding creative ways to limit the department’s expenses following a budget deficit of more than $9 million, spurred by the creation of St. George.
This year, BRPD has disbanded its Mounted Patrol Division and Youth Advisory Council, ended gun-prevention overtime patrols, and briefly stopped the city’s ShotSpotter program, all to save money.
Throughout the year, Morse has also reiterated that labor is his department’s highest expense.
“I can tell you that we have saved quite a bit of overtime this year by limiting the number of holidays officers work,” Morse said, adding that less overtime is also being assigned in other areas outside of events.
He has thanked his officers during this belt-tightening, saying he is proud of them for doing “more with less.”
Morse says there is no set policy for event organizers to shoulder the cost of security, and that it’s still “kind of up in the air” which events are required to pay and which aren’t.
For example, Morse expects to spend more than $20,000 on close to 400 hours of officer overtime for Southern’s homecoming parade on Sunday. Those costs will not be reimbursed by the university.
But Morse said LSU will be paying the department for security at its events this year.
While BRPD has a matrix to estimate the number of officers needed for an event, parades make those calculations much harder. Morse said his staff has two members whose full-time jobs are to coordinate special events.
Those staffers work with event organizers to estimate the number of officers needed and an extra-duty wage that will attract that required amount of officers to volunteer. Other factors, like minimum overtime wages for different positions within the department and if the event is on a traditional holiday, complicate that cost, Morse said.
Some positions, like drone operators or supervisors at command posts, will still be paid by BRPD since these positions are needed for regular police work at the event, not crowd control or traffic diversion.
“When you’re going to host an event, you know you have to pay the food vendor, you know you have to pay the band. Well, security just needs to be added to that list,” Morse said. “It’s just part of the bill.”
Changing the face of Baton Rouge Mardi Gras
Robert King, president of the Society for the Preservation of Lagniappe in Louisiana, which organizes the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade, said he has been trying to speak with city-parish officials about how new security costs might affect his events.
Security costs for the Spanish Town parade have been estimated at $50,000, he said.
“We can afford it,” King said, but his concern is for the smaller parades, like Krewe Mystique and Shenandoah.
He also said any new expense will “trickle down” to individual krewes, sponsors and charities.
“Instead of writing a $15,000 or $20,000 check to a charity, we might do $3,000,” King said. Lagniappe’s earnings are directed each year to local charities, including the Baton Rouge Children’s Advocacy Center.