A preview event for Hot August nights at the Long Beach Convention Center, shortly after it was announced that the show will come to Long Beach in 2011. Photo by Bob Maguglin.
8:10am | Politicians in Reno, Nevada are all in a tizzy today, as they worry that the popular car show Hot August Nights will move their event to Long Beach next year and leave Reno in the dust (moreso).
Organizers of Hot August Nights say that the show is expanding to Long Beach, not permanently relocating. The event regularly draws hundreds of thousands of spectators over three days.
The Reno City Council tonight will ask organizers to turn over their contract with the City of Long Beach in order to examine the wording and see if the organizers are telling the truth. If they refuse to turn over the contract, some councilmembers are threatening to pull the event permits for this year’s car show in Reno.
Hot August Nights executive director Bruce Walter said, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal, that the contract has confidential clauses and he could lose his job if he allowed that information to become public.
Hot August Nights announced in June that it will come to downtown Long Beach in August of next year.
The controversy began when a recent Los Angeles Business Journal article quoted Walter as saying that the car show would move to Long Beach permanently because the cost of holding the event in Reno is “horrific.”
Hot August Nights spokespeople have vehemently denied that Walter made those remarks and say that the article is inaccurate.