The Decatur City Council by a 6-1 margin on Monday approved a Decatur Celebration request to fence this year’s festival both to increase revenue and as a public safety tool.
This year event organizers will be charging admission both in advance and at gates for the street festival, set for August 4-6 in Downtown Decatur. Organizers for several years now have expressed concern about the event’s increasing expenses and declining revenues to the point of publicly speculating as to whether the event would be able to survive. In fencing the event, the festival will now be able to charge at 7 gates spread throughout the event’s outer footprint.
Festival organizer Lori Sturgill said that the fence will also serve as a tool to better monitor and control the potential for violent acts which, unfortunately, have occurred more regularly at large events across the globe.
In other business, council members voted 7-0 in support of an economic impact study to help optimize strategic investments in the region’s developing intermodal and multimodal transportation system. Most the study’s $288,530 cost will be paid through a grant totaling just more than $230,000 from the State of Illinois.
Contact Billy Tyus at 217-424-2727 for more information.
