01/09/2023
As many of you have already heard, BCE made the painful and difficult decision not to produce Hometown Fest this year.
Here is the full statement from BCE:
Founded in 1998 by Chris Dailey, Boulder Creek Events was essentially created to save the Boulder Creek Festival®. By 1998, the festival was in danger of passing into Boulder history. Due to several different factors, the event had fallen upon hard times; it had become unsuccessful and had acquired much debt over the years. Although it was widely known that the festival required new management, no one wanted to take on the “burden” that the festival had become. At this point, Chris--who had become intrinsically familiar with the festival by volunteering as the logistics manager of the event, and then hired on as the operations manager--stepped forward and assumed the debt and responsibility of this beloved community event. And thus, BCE was born.
BCE successfully produced the BCF from 1998-2018, and originally created Hometown Fest in 1999 as a Labor Day weekend bookend event to the Boulder Creek Festival, which is held over Memorial Day weekend. In 2019, when the City of Boulder decided to go with a Denver-based for-profit event company to produce the BCF, we were absolutely stunned and heartbroken. Determined not to let the loss of our signature event be the end of our little nonprofit, we continued to produce concert series, ice skating rinks, and Hometown Fest for the next few years.
Of course, in 2020 the global pandemic hit, and it hit event planning and production companies especially hard. Directors Chris and Meg hung in there for the next two years, but unfortunately Hometown Fest was simply not sustainable anymore. Not many people know this, but the fees to put on an event in the City of Boulder are exorbitant— everything from park fees, permits, police, parking meters, you name it. Our little hometown event couldn’t stand a chance. Producing events in Boulder Parks has become increasingly expensive and more and more unsafe over the past 10 years. Our last-ditch effort was last year, when we chose to move Hometown Fest up a couple of weekends in August so as not to compete with the dozens of other events, concerts, and activities that are traditionally held over Labor Day weekend in this region. This was ultimately unsuccessful.
It’s impossible to know what the future holds, but what I do know is that we have truly loved producing safe, fun, family-friendly events over the past 25 years, and it was always our honor to be a beloved part of our community.
Boulderites will have to look elsewhere for their fix of creekside Labor Day fun.
