These thoughts were first published here on September 24, 2012. See also: A message to Harvest Homecoming food vendors ... and your PourGate update for Monday, September 30.
My personal position on Harvest Homecoming has remained fairly consistent, and so at the risk of offending the swill walk’s perennial night crawlers, let’s recap the argument.
First and foremost, no offense is intended toward Harvest Homecoming’s many volunteers. They're lifers. They believe. They work hard year-round, and their fundamental aim of maintaining a family-oriented annual celebration is admirable.
None of us want Harvest Homecoming to go entirely away. We merely want it to begin marching in step with the times, so as to better incorporate today's changing New Albany into their plan.
Harvest Homecoming has gone as far as it can go by retaining an operational model built for the 1980’s, when downtown was utterly deserted, and no one much cared either way. Back then, downtown wasn’t being used, but now it is, and the yearly clash of demographic priorities can only become more starkly evident as years pass.
Today’s Harvest Homecoming must be persuaded, cajoled, prodded and/or threatened into commencing a reinvention of itself and a subsequent evolution into the sort of annual civic event better representing where and what the city is now, and in conceptual terms, a civic event that both passively mirrors and actively enhances the ongoing revitalization of downtown New Albany. Currently, it does neither.
The festival no longer should be permitted to be the short-term tail wagging an entire city’s 7/24/365 dog by advocating restrictive terms of downtown engagement, and in pursuing a plan of operation that routinely scuffles downtown’s fragile seedlings, whether planted in the dirt, or located behind those previously unoccupied storefronts.
Yes, it is true that progress has been made on this score, but not quickly enough. For so long as those downtown businesses located on Harvest Homecoming’s core street grid – businesses investing in the city and operating in the city year-round – must continue to fight for the simple right to have access to their own front doors during the festival’s booth days, and furthermore, be compelled to pay Harvest Homecoming a rental fee for a clear pathway to their own place of business, then something’s still awry in Come Pay City.
This begs the first of many questions, as hinted at yesterday:
How can the Board of Public Works countenance this pay-to-stay-open scheme?
Which precedent allows a four-day-yearly festival unattached to the city to charge for frontage on the city’s own streets and sidewalks?
Aren’t these businesses already paying taxes for this access?
And so on. More thoughts tomorrow.
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