There was plenty of goodwill at the meeting. From Mayor Len Brown down, euphoria about the three-week arts extravaganza flowed - but no money. The following year's budget had already been set.
The next festival will now be in March 2015, with the trust hoping that from then it will become an annual event, putting it on the same cultural footing as Australian state capital festivals in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and, since 2012, Adelaide.
Last Thursday, the council budget committee agreed to include the additional funding needed to make the festival an annual event from 2016 in the 2014/2015 annual plan consultation process "to help assess the level of public support".
The festival receives $2.23 million a year, through the council-funded Auckland Regional Amenities Trust, to stage a biennial event. To fund an annual festival would cost an additional $1 million a year, reducing the annual subsidy per festival from $4.46 million to $3.23 million.
The trust says the savings per festival result from better use of overheads such as office rental, staff costs and overseas talent scouting.
Next step in the process will be the presentation of a business case by council officers to the May 2014 meeting of the budget committee.
By all the usual counts, the March festival was a roaring success, with ticket sales of more than 101,000, doubling those of the 2011 event. Another 81,000 attended free events, watching and listening to 1049 artists from 17 countries.
Preparing a business case for an arts festival is, at best, an inexact and incomplete science.
Audience numbers are a sign of popularity, certainly, and economists love to agonise over the additional funds that have been brought into the city as a result of the event taking place.
Over the past decade or so, there have been attempts to assign a monetary value to intangible benefits and costs that can be added to a cost-benefit analysis to show the success of a cultural event.
This led to Flinders University head of tourism Dr Steve Brown setting up a Cultural Value Research Project to evaluate "the real worth of the arts in Adelaide".
What surprised the researchers was that even locals who did not attend any events valued the worth of the festival to the city at more than $18 million. Those who attended, rated its value at $76.7 million.
Dr Brown says: "We now have clear evidence that there is a significant cultural value of the Adelaide Festival among South Australians who do not attend it. It shows how the whole population feels about the festival and it backs up our claim to be the festival state."
The cultural value to South Australians is calculated following face-to-face interviews with attendees and non-attendees who were asked to put a dollar value on aspects of the festival, including its effect on the image and development of Adelaide.
This attempt to measure "non-market" resources in the field of arts and culture is a first for this part of the world, but it has been used in other areas, starting with the 1986 Grand Prix in South Australia.
Announcing the results earlier this year, Dr Brown said is was no surprise those that attended the festival valued it highly. "However, we didn't quite expect people who don't make that investment to value it so much."
He said further surveys would be conducted as the work "promises to put a real, hard dollar figure on the value of arts and cultural activities in this state".
This research is so relevant to our situation, Dr Brown should be invited to speak to Auckland councillors and bureaucrats before any decisions are made.
