Due to tight security measures on U2 tickets, the box office manager of the Providence Civic Center has been suspended for one month without pay because he sold more tickets than he was allowed, according to Steve Lombardi, executive director of the Civic Center.
“It’s an embarrassment to the building, and I feel we had to take an appropriate response,” Lombardi said yesterday. “I was very dissatisfied with the way the sale went here, and I owe it to U2 and the promoter to do this.”
Joe Joel, the Civic Center box office manager for the last 20 years, was suspended because of his actions during Friday’s U2 ticket sale at the building. Most of the tickets were sold by phone charge, but 300 fans holding wristbands (permitting them 4 tickets each) were taken care of at the box office. That totaled 1,200 tickets, as mandated by the band and promoter, but Joel allowed an extra 115 tickets to be sold to unauthorized sources (people without wristbands) before the Ticketmaster office in New York, where U2’s business manager was monitoring sales by computer, shut him off.
“Several of us had reminded him of the limit beforehand, but he exceeded it,” said Doug Borg, vice-president of Tea Party Concerts. “He sailed right by the 1,200 figure.”
The fear is that those excess tickets ended up with scalpers. Already, a local ticket agency is advertising U2 tickets for $1,000 each, Borg said. “This is how the public gets screwed,” he added.
As a result of the fiasco, Lombardi said that the Civic Center, which is owned by the city of Providence, will lobby more heavily for an anti-scalping bill filed in the state legislature two months ago. It requires outside ticket agents to charge no more than a $6 profit on concert tickets.
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