Another one bites the dust.
The 12th Street Music Festival committee has announced that it’s cancelling this year’s event, which had been moved to Sunday, July 17 from Sunday, July 24, so it wouldn’t be on the same weekend as the Uptown Live street festival.
“We tried to make the new date work. We just didn’t get the interest we usually do,” said Liz Brabbins, president of the West End Business Association. “This time of year, a month before, we’d usually have 100 booths signed up. We had eight. I have eight applications.”
Brabbins said the festival has become an important event for changing the identity of its struggling business corridor. She said the group hopes to hold it again next year – in its previous time slot.
“The competition with other events has meant that many of our vendors had previous commitments and our major sponsor chose to move to another event,” she wrote in an email to the Record. “The increased insurance liability requirement for our beer garden made this popular feature a non-starter this year. There have been many unintended consequences in changing the date and therefore, rather than produce an inferior event, we felt it better to postpone it with the intention of returning next year.”
While the festival was able to line up another sponsor, organizers said there was no point putting sponsorship money into an event that wasn’t going to be successful.
“If vendors aren’t coming out, people aren’t going to come out. We want to do it in a big way,” Brabbins said. “We want to do it again next year. Hopefully, if we can figure out the date situation with the city.”
Brabbins belives the music festival would have been successful if it had stuck to Sunday, July 24 – and the city asked Uptown Live to pick a different weekend. Some city officials have suggested it’s not council or staff’s role to tell organizations which dates they can host festivals or events in the city.
“I hear what they are saying. The only thing with that is they give us money. They know we are a small organization. There are no other events in the West End. There is nothing else that the West End Business Association does for the businesses event wise – this is it,” she said. “Without this event, it shuts us down on 12th Street, it shuts down the organization. The businesses, I have never seen so many vacancies on 12th Street before. I know uptown is thriving and they are getting lots of money and they are building and flourishing on that, but at the same time we are just dying over here.”
Brabbins said organizers received a $5,000 grant from the city for the event, which will be returned. While some bands had been lined up, she said no contracts had been signed.
Coun. Chuck Puchmayr, who has helped organize the festival and performed at it in the past, is disappointed but supported organizers’ decision to cancel this year’s event. While there was some discussion about making the event smaller, he said that wasn’t something supported by 12th Street merchants who would have been located outside the festival area.
Unlike the downtown and uptown, Puchmayr said Sapperton and the West End business areas don’t have business improvement associations to organize these types of events and raise funds for initiatives in their commercial areas.
“They don’t have fulltime people who are managing this stuff,” he said. “I think that makes it really difficult. Small businesses work extreme hours for one thing, most of them do. Doing that, plus putting on a festival which is pretty intense, that really adds up.”
The 12th Street Music Festival isn’t the first organization to cancel an event this year, as the Quayside Community Board canceled this year’s Quayside Community Festival and Sale. Northwest Fan Fest, the G-Zero Championship Racing Series and Piknic Electronik had planned to host events in New West this summer but pulled the plug for a variety of reasons and hope to host events in the summer of 2017.
