Right in the centre - Naysayers can paint or get off the ladder

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Published on Thursday, July 30, 2015

By Ken Waddell

The Neepawa Banner

As I sat in my office on Saturday July 25, 2015, it was a much different July Saturday than the past 8-10 years. For most of those years, I was chairman of the Neepawa Area Lily Festival and I was involved for all 18 festivals. 

The Lily Festival had become a signature event for Neepawa. It had 200 plus volunteers, a full time office and a part-time executive director. It was the go-to organization for events that handled Neepawa’s tourism outreach, the Homes for Christmas event, a concert or two per year and oh yes, the world-renowned Lily Festival. It covered all or part of the advertising costs for a number of the festival weekend events including the parade, the quilt show and the lily show. It helped with advertising other events such as the Yellowhead Roadrunners Runway drags. It brought thousands of people to town.

At 11 a.m., the exact same time I sat in my office and started this column, on a Lily Festival weekend Saturday the town of Neepawa would have been packed with thousands of people watching the parade and then descending on the festival site and the restaurants.

But on this 2015 Saturday, all you hear is the occasional car going by and you could shoot a cannon down Neepawa’s main street and not hurt anyone.

That deserted street day I wrote, “The VCC JamFest is about to start and that’s a good thing. The Runway Drags are about to roar into life and tomorrow will be Sunday, July 25, and the Margaret Laurence Home Antique Sale is scheduled to happen at the Yellowhead Centre. What a major difference a year makes!”

Many people ask why the Lily Festival died? Actually, it didn’t die. It was murdered by a very small group of negative people, but that remains a matter of debate. But it’s done. It’s over, it’s finished.

But is it?

Out of the still smouldering ashes of the Neepawa Lily Festival, there arose some really positive efforts. Five downtown businesses actually got together and did what businesses are supposed to do. They invested planning, time and a bit of advertising money into the Mid-Summer’s Eve event which was small but very good. The Viscount Cultural Council built a permanent outdoor stage/patio and put on Jam Fest which was pretty low key but very enjoyable. The YHRR continued with their annual runway races and a large crowd attended that event. The Margaret Laurence Home and VCC put on the annual antique sale and obviously without the Lily Festival crowd, their numbers were way down but it was still a good event. The Lily Nook put on a lily show and a lily sale on their site, it was very good. Next year will need more attention and more advertising and promotion, but these were all quality events.

It will take a lot of work to get summer events back to the size and excitement of the Lily Festival but it’s a good start.

So who carries the ball from here on in? Obviously it’s not the town council. It’s not really their job and quite frankly, getting town councillors out to events is like pulling teeth. Most of them were conspicuous by their absence this past weekend. It’s not the town staff’s job to coordinate events either, although they have always been very co-operative with any community events. For this past weekend they helped by providing street barricades and picnic benches. Year in and year out, the Town of Neepawa public works staff have always been more than helpful with the Lily Festival and any other community events. It won’t likely be the Lily Festival committee as they are shutting down and winding up their books. The Lily Festival constitution states that when they shut down, the money goes to the Town of Neepawa.

What is starting to happen, and should happen, is a resurgence of pride and interest in summer events in Neepawa and we saw some evidence of that already this past weekend. Also earlier in the year, the Neepawa and District Chamber held a midway/fair event. On that same weekend, the Tangled Threads Quilt Guild held a quilt show and the Neepawa Wildlife Association held their first ever gun show.

If there’s one overriding lesson to be learned from the demise of the Lily Festival it is that a community should never allow negativity to be the driving force. Constructive criticism should be welcomed but the naysayers should have been told to paint or get off the ladder, to shove off in other words. Only positive people with positive ideas should be encouraged. 

Neepawa turned a corner this year or maybe they hit bottom. We lost the festival, Canada Day was less than spectacular. Community events have been pretty low key around here lately but with the recent efforts by the chamber, the businesses, the VCC, the MLH, the YHRR and others, positive change will win the day.