The merchants along Monterey Road in downtown Morgan Hill are emotional and irate and rightly so. The organizers of the city’s Mushroom Mardi Gras festival are going to kill their business during the first night of the busiest three-day summer weekend.
Businesses like Poppy’s Fish, Poultry & More and the Theater Shop, to name a few, are going to suffer as access will be cut off
at 4 pm Friday evening, the night before the two-day celebration because of a kick-off street dance at Monterey Road and West Third Street. The merchants feel the event is being used to give event planners extra time to set up their booths making it convenient for them but inconvenient for merchants.
Third East Street will be shut down and taken over with outhouses. Poppy’s will lose money. Customers will be unhappy. They will have zero access to the store short of parking on Depot Street and walking to the end of the block to enter the store. Not only will some merchants lose money, many will be forced to hire extra security personnel to keep the rowdy crowds under control, particularly to keep drinkers off their properties as many don’t have liquor licenses and are worried about liability issues.
It makes no sense for the organizers to do this. It’s an affront to the merchants who need the Friday evening business – the most profitable – it’s downright absurd to close the main artery so early, from Main to Dunne avenues.
The mindboggling dilemma in this whole controversy is that it could have been avoided. The organizers could have closed at 9pm, as prescribed in last year’s guidelines adopted by the city council. The policy clearly states that street closures the day before an event should not occur before 9pm, but because the dance is set to begin at 7pm, organizers have gotten away with closing three hours before the start time, a loophole in the policy.
Business owners have been organizing themselves but their voices have not been heard. Many have signed a petition stating they’re adamantly opposed to closing the six-block stretch before 9pm.
Last year, the festival shut down Monterey Road at 7pm, even though organizers wanted to close at 2pm. Merchants were expecting better treatment this year. They didn’t get it.
While we admire the goals of the nonprofit organization that puts together the festival – giving proceeds to scholarships and helping to support nonprofit groups – we don’t think it’s wise to work against the merchants who daily work their businesses to make a profit and who consider the Friday night crowds their bread and butter.
Some local businesses are also complaining about not being allowed to set up booths along the street. Even more disturbing is that event planners are bringing in competing enterprises into town because they’re considered a draw at the expense of smaller similar local businesses.
As the city’s policy states, quality-run events should help solidify downtown as the heart of the community and are generally supported by the fixed businesses and residents in the heart of Morgan Hill as long as they don’t impose unnecessary hardships.
