TURNERS FALLS — Town officials and event organizers are strategizing how they might continue the Great Falls Festival, as discussed at Monday’s Selectboard meeting.
Parks and Recreation Director Jon Dobosz said he brought the idea to the Selectboard after reconsidering his initial reluctance to be involved with a revival of the annual festival. The tradition, which drew up to 10,000 people to Avenue A each year, concluded in October, with organizers citing major fatigue after 12 summers of yearly planning.
“When we heard that (lead organizer) Mike Nelson was no longer going to keep the Great Falls Festival going a couple weeks ago, we were kind of surprised,” Dobosz said. “My initial reaction was, ‘People are going to come to Parks and Recreation and want us to take over the event. It’s not gonna happen. If anybody calls the office asking us about it, we’re not gonna do it. There’s no way we can do it.’”
Knowing the magnitude of work that organizers undertook to plan the festival is what dissuaded Dobosz from the prospect of taking on responsibilities, he said. The idea lingered in his mind, however, as he considered the “significant gap” the loss of the festival opened in the village’s fabric. The next day, Dobosz and his department discussed stepping up as organizers, he recalled.
“There’s certainly some interest there to take over maybe not the entire scale of what the Great Falls Fest was, but definitely some themes,” Dobosz told the Selectboard. “I think that moving on with a different title — again, keeping with the same themes — is something that we can probably pull off successfully down at Unity Park.”
Dobosz said “maintaining some of that energy” might not include three stages as the Great Falls Festival had, but would include a “much, much smaller scale” of festivities, such as arts presentations, craftspeople and food. The festival could span from Unity Park to the lower end of Second Street, he suggested.
Following Dobosz’s pitch, Selectboard Chair Rich Kuklewicz revealed that he, Nelson and Town Administrator Steve Ellis met recently to discuss the logistics of hosting such an event. While Kuklewicz and Ellis recognized the amount of effort needed, they committed to at least exploring the possibility of supporting the tradition’s continuation.
“I think we all appreciate what the Great Falls Festival has brought to the village downtown and the town of Montague over the course of the last 13 years or whatever it proved to be,” Ellis said. “We did try to think strategically about how we could integrate the event with the downtown in a smaller way, but still in a meaningful way because there could be opportunities to create better and more productive foot traffic for our village and downtown businesses.”
Dobosz said he reached out to business owners and event organizers Peter Chilton, of Nova Motorcycles, and Steve Valeski, of Pioneer Valley Brewery, to discuss potential collaboration. He also said he spoke with Suzanne LoManto, Montague’s assistant town planner and director of RiverCulture, Montague’s arts and business programming organization.
“We do have a history of having … this kind of downtown medium-size event that we have done in the past,” LoManto said of RiverCulture. “I am very much interested in keeping this going.”
Kuklewicz encouraged Dobosz and LoManto to continue their communications. He also voiced a desire to speak further with Ellis and Assistant Town Administrator Walter Ramsey during “working meetings.”
“I think together,” he said, “we might be able to come up with some ideas.”
Reach Julian Mendoza at 413-930-4231 or jmendoza@recorder.com.