It’s hard to please everyone, especially folks whose livelihoods
are touched by a massive street party downtown.
Morgan Hill – It’s hard to please everyone, especially folks whose livelihoods are touched by a massive street party downtown.
Such is the case with the community’s Mushroom Mardi Gras festival, a popular Morgan Hill event that’s bounced around for 28 years and will move once more this May 26 and 27 to the Morgan Hill Community and Cultural Center and Depot Street.
After two years of holding the festival downtown on the city’s main drag, merchants seem pretty nearly split on whether taking the festival off Monterey Road is a good idea. On the one hand, some say the two-day event brought gridlock, rowdies and lost sales to their stores. On the other hand, some merchants say the infusion of 50,000 people downtown gained them exposure and sales they never would have had otherwise. For the latter group, the announcement last month that Mardi Gras organizers were moving the party came as an unwelcome surprise.
“I feel like somebody made the decision without telling us,” said Victoria Herrera, owner of Blush Boutique on Monterey Road, reminiscing on last year’s Mardi Gras. “My store would get so busy, you could barely move around … I’m disappointed it’s being moved.”
Herra’s not the only one who feels that way.
“It seems to me there could have been some other solutions explored before just yanking the festival from downtown,” said Jeff Nunes, co-owner of The Music Tree, which sells musical instruments and arranges lessons for students. “It just seems there could have been more dialogue before removing an event that brings in 50,000 people.”
While last year’s crowds forced him to close the store early, Nunes said the increased foot traffic during the day helped him triple the number of people signing up for music lessons. “A lot of it was people walking downtown and realizing there’s a music store here,” he said.
Alas, not every merchant had a positive Mardi Gras experience. The city last June conducted a survey to gauge how downtown property owners felt about the event, and according to Assistant City Manager Julie Spier, the results were “50-50.” But only 26 people responded after 194 surveys were mailed to addresses on the Morgan Hill Downtown Association’s list.
“Half of them loved it, half of them didn’t want Mushroom Mardi Gras downtown,” Spier said. “But it’s really not a scientifically sound survey because of the small response.”
But it’s unclear whether the small response suggests a larger controversy, general apathy or poor outreach. Herrera said she didn’t receive a survey in the mail, which Spier acknowledges is a “fair complaint.” But oversights on the mailing list, the city official added, would have been the downtown association’s blunder.
At the end of the day, all the questions surrounding the survey and the negativity from some of the feedback factored into the decision to move the festival, said Dan Sullivan, president of the Mushroom Mardi Gras Board of Directors.
“It was a factor,” Sullivan said, adding there were others, as well, such as concerns of gridlock around the food vendors’ area. “I thought of the cultural center as a way of moving the festival away from the heart of downtown, and the more we looked at it, the more we thought it could really work well as a contained space.”
Moving the festival also signals a return to its roots, when it was held in more open environs. The first Mushroom Mardi Gras was held October 1980 at what was then called Hill Country off Foothill Boulevard, where Fry’s golf course lies today. Two years later, the festival switched to Memorial Day weekend and moved to a field south of Cochrane Road between 101 and Monterey Road, near where Marie Callender’s is located. In spring 1983, the event moved to Community Park where it stayed until moving downtown in 2005.
While originally started to raise money for the fire department, the goal of the festival now is to have a safe and fun celebration for the community while raising funds for scholarships and providing a venue for other non-profits to raise money. Last year, the $184,000 event raised $30,000 for 30 scholarships, including 28 for seniors at Live Oak High School.
But for all the good it did, Sunday Minnich, the event’s director, said coordinating the festival downtown while hearing unpleasant murmurs from some merchants made her job more stressful. One controversy last year was the closure of Monterey Road at 4pm on the Friday before the festival. The city’s special events guidelines prevent street closures before 9pm unless they occur three hours prior to a scheduled event. To allow Mardi Gras volunteers more time to set up tents for the following morning, organizers planned a 7pm street dance last year, according to Minnich.
“We did everything the downtown association wanted us to do,” Minnich said of the maneuver, adding volunteers would have had trouble setting up the event after 9pm.
Regardless of past misunderstandings – indeed, partly because of them – Minnich said she hopes to work closely with the downtown association to ensure the best results from this year’s event. But she’s already hearing split voices from merchants on whether foot traffic should be encouraged on Monterey Road. It’ll be up to the downtown association, Minnich said, to sort out its position on what it expects from the festival before organizers can help reach that goal.
Tony Burchyns covers Morgan Hill for The Times.
Reach him at (408) 779-4106 ext. 201 or
tb*******@*************es.com.
