Is the City of New Westminster pitting longtime community festivals against flashy new events?
James Crosty, lead organizer of the Quayside Festival and Sale, is concerned the city seems to be creating “city-sponsored mega events” to compete with longstanding community events. He voiced the concerns while announcing his group was postponing its 10th annual event until 2017, partly because the city had approved a new electronic dance festival, Piknic Elektronic, that same day at Westminster Pier Park.
Crosty said “this practice seems familiar” as city council allowed Uptown Live to be held on the same weekend as the 12th Street Music Festival, despite concerns from the folks on 12th Street that Uptown Live would draw crowds and sponsorship away from the longstanding event. Uptown Live will still be held on July 23, but organizers of the 12th Street Music Festival have decided to hold that event on July 17, a week earlier than originally planned.
Crosty thinks the food truck festival and the Piknic Elektronic are great for the city, but he said city hall has to do a better job communicating with event organizers to avoid “event overload” scenarios.
Crosty was planning to postpone this year’s Quayside festival because of 10 to 15 logistical issues, but learning that a third major event was taking place downtown on the same day was the final straw.
“Sponsorships, construction, road closures, emergency management, logistics, Pattullo closures, crowd control and the severely limited parking from the loss of spaces due to both the Bosa development and removal of the parkade – only skims the surface of the possible logistical nightmare foreseen with the addition of the Piknic Electronic at Pier Park,” he said in a press release. “With a purported 90,000 attendees at the food truck event, an attendance of 10,000 at the Quayside Community Board’s Boardwalk Festival and Sale, and now an estimated 4,200 to attend the Piknic Elektronic, that’s 104,200 people – nearly twice the entire population of New Westminster – in this compact and highly disrupted area.”
Crosty said he’s already in talks with city staff about coming up with potential parking remedies so the festival can be held again next year, but he couldn’t leave performers and vendors hanging in case a solution couldn’t be found in time for this year.
“I just don’t see the experience as being a positive one and I want the city to be presented in its best light,” he said. “The numbers and the logistics didn’t line up this year. It’s going to make it all that much better next year. We will resolve some of the outstanding issues.”
The Quayside Festival and Sale has always been held on the opening weekend of the PNE when no other festivals were held in New West, but Crosty said he’d be willing to consider a new date in the future. Someone suggested the event be scaled back this year to be a community garage sale, but that wasn’t something Crosty wanted to do for the 10th annual event.
“The reason why we have up to 10,000 people attending the event is they come for the experience,” he said. “It’s relaxing, it’s tranquil. We have bands. We just got our kids’ zone working last year.”
Last November, one of the organizers of the 12th Street Music Festival expressed concern about the “mischaracterizations” of its festival as being like a block party, rather than an event that has attracted Juno-award winning musicians and top music professionals in Vancouver. Similarly, Crosty is irked with suggestions the festival is “just a garage sale,” noting it’s drawn thousands of visitors to the waterfront in past years, created business for shops at River Market in the downtown, raised money for local charities and kept thousands of items out of landfills.
The Record could not reach city officials for comment by deadline. Stay tuned for an update.
