Glen Park Festival in trouble: You can help

From the Festival organizers:

As most of you know, the Glen Park Festival is a one-day annual community event that brings our neighborhood together and raises money for schools and nonprofits in the Glen Park area. There are a few neighbors on Wilder Street who have signed a petition in protest of the festival. What they are asking for (eliminating Wilder Street from the festival footprint) would mean the end of the festival. As much as I would like to say there are workable alternatives, we either need to maintain the current festival footprint or discontinue the festival. (see below for more information about why that is the case).

The ISCOTT committee is interested in hearing whether there is community support for the festival. To assist that process, the festival committee has posted an online survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/STPLHJL

Whether you love or strongly dislike the festival, or feel somewhere in between, please take a moment to give your feedback to the committee. The survey will take only 2 minutes at most. We would like to hear from all of our neighbors, but we are especially interested in hearing from those who live within the bounds of the festival. We do ask for contact information just for the purposes of verifying responses, but we will not contact you without your permission. You can choose to complete the survey anonymously.

If you would like to write a letter/email of support for the festival, you can direct those to Cindy Shamban (ISCOTT liaison) at Cindy.Shamban@sfmta.com. I can also provide you with a mailing address if you prefer.

Thank you,

-Rebecca

 MurrayMetzger

Glen Park Festival Chair

P.S. For those interested in the details, here is some more information about why we are restricted to the current festival footprint:

Eliminating Wilder street means losing 40 vendor booths and our children’s area, which translates to a financial loss of $7700 in revenues. That would eliminate our grant program completely (we normally give 5-7K to nonprofits and schools in the neighborhood) and put us between $700-2700 in the red. We can’t operate a festival in the red.

Aware of the inconvenience to our Wilder neighbors, over the years we have looked at other possible layouts. MUNI routes and fire lane codes prevent any other possibilities. (There’s no way to reroute the buses that pass through the Diamond/Chenery and Bosworth/Diamond intersections and Kern Street is too narrow to hold booths and the legally mandated fire lanes.) Also, we have tried to cut expenses as much as possible; however, there has been a steady increase in city permit and other fees that has added pressure to our bottom line.