Downtown festivals adapting ballpark’s presence
With the new ballpark drawing thousands Downtown, finding open dates to hold summer festivals in that area has become a balancing act.
Before the stadium was built, schedule conflicts rarely, if ever, happened. But with more than 70 baseball games scheduled between April and August and the Neon Desert Music Festival is going on this weekend, organizers are learning how to share Downtown El Paso.
“We’ve got a lot of moving parts when it comes to special events and the Ballpark,” said Rudy Vasquez, communications manager for the Downtown Management District. “We’ve developed a master calendar so we can all kind of be apprised of what’s coming up down the road and how we can work with each other.”
According to the Downtown Management District, there is no written rule that says when there’s a baseball game other Downtown events can’t be held. But if that other Downtown event involves the closing of a street, like the Downtown Street Festival here on Santa Fe Street, then they ask those organizers to move their dates.”
“We ended up moving our weekend up from June 28-29 to June 21-22,” said radio executive Brad Dubow, who has held the Downtown Street Festival the weekend before the Fourth of July for the past dozen years. “it was advised that we had five years already reserved for street fest and now we have to work around the dates of when the Chihuahuas will be in town, which we understand.”
“It really hasn’t affected us too much,” said Zach Paul, who organized this weekend’s Neon Desert Music Fest. “That is something we’re definitely going to have to take into consideration (going forward. If the baseball team is in town, how that’s going to affect us.”
“We know we’re going to be on average at home 14 to 16 times a month from April through the end of August,” said Brad Dubow, GM of the El Paso Chihuahuas. “There’s going to be events we balance around together and we’re going to talk and the sooner we can get our schedule we would hand that off to people that are our partners Downtown.”
Everyone ABC-7 spoke with talked about it being “a partnership” Downtown. They also agreed that having conflicting dates is a good problem to have. Both Paul and Dubow said at some point they’d like to incorporate the Ballpark, if available, into their summer festivals.
