The 36th annual Sacramento Jazz Festival pulled in about the same amount of money as it did last year -- an estimated $1.2 million -- but more people may have attended the festival this year than last year, according to a festival official.

Gene Berthelsen, the executive director of the festival, said the troubled economy affected this year's festival.

“The poor economy was a factor in why we didn’t do better,” Berthelsen said.

The festival staffers will continue to crunch numbers for weeks to come, but preliminary estimates show that this year’s festival drew somewhere between 65,000 and 70,000 people, Berthelsen said. Festival-goers paid an estimated $1.2 million to the festival for tickets, as well as for other purchases such as alcoholic beverages, clothing and beads, he noted.

Last year’s event attracted 65,000 people and yielded about $1.1 million in sales to the festival, according to Berthelsen.

It was unclear Monday how much money this year’s festival generated in sales to the Sacramento economy through visits to hotels, restaurants and other businesses. Mike Testa, spokesman for the Sacramento Convention and Visitors Bureau, said last week that the bureau was waiting to hear from hotels on their attendance figures during the festival weekend.

Visitors and locals during last year’s festival spent about $8 million total on hotels meals, retail, parking, gas and other expenses. Testa didn’t return phone calls Monday afternoon for an update.

Berthelsen noted that rainy weather was the cause of last year’s relatively low attendance at the festival. This year’s warm and pleasant weather means that the attendance count is probably higher than last year’s, he said.

But even though more people may have attended this year than last year, that didn’t mean they spent a lot of money at the festival.

Festival attendees were “hanging pretty tight onto their purse strings,” Berthelsen said.