What it actually decides.
The two words are used together and describe different things. Grounding is the connection to earth. Bonding is connecting metal parts to each other so that everything touchable sits at the same potential and a fault current has a low-resistance path back to its source, which is what makes a breaker trip instead of a person becoming the path.
At a temporary event the bonding requirement reaches further than people expect. Metal enclosures, metal frames, raceways and the metal parts of structures including stages are bonded, with a conductor the code recognises for the purpose.
The rule most often missed concerns two sources. Where portable structures are fed by more than one supply — the usual case being a generator outside and the building’s own service inside, both reaching the same stage — and those structures are close together, the grounding conductors of the different sources have to be bonded to each other. Without that, two parts of the same stage can sit at different potentials, and the person who finds out is the one touching both.
A portable generator is its own case. Where its neutral is bonded to its frame and it is feeding cord-connected equipment, a separate earth electrode is generally not required by the code — but the authority having jurisdiction may require one anyway, and a hard-wired installation is a different question. It is an ask-first item, not an assume-first one.
We own this equipment.
Municipal event production — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.