So the 2018 Dogwood Festival is officially in the books. The event on Saturday featured a great parade and wrapped up with the wonderful Dogwood Dance at the Elks Lodge.

With great events like that and other side activities like the Quincy Preserves Home Tours it is a shame all I keep hearing are complaints regarding no carnival for this year’s Dogwood Festival. Social media escalated the conversation as well.

The city said the carnival paperwork never made it to the City Council for approval. You might recall, last year’s carnival left a bad taste in that they left town with no cleanup done in the area. Before passing blame around there is one thing to remember.  When putting on events in the city, permits are needed and cleanup is necessary as well at the conclusion of the event. No one knows that better than I do in putting on the St. Patrick’s Parade each year.

Honestly, finding people to help with the cleanup process is not easy especially for non-money making events. I am sure you are wondering why don’t they use the Adams County prisoners to do the cleanup projects?  I thought the same thing, so I asked Adams County Sheriff Brian Vonderhaar. Sheriff Vonderhaar said unfortunately, the SWAP Program personnel can only work on weekdays per their union contract and most of these events are held on weekends.

A year ago I addressed this problem and I made the statement “It is not beyond the possibility that some of these events just might dissolve because it becomes too work intensive to continue them including the post-event cleanup operations". It looks like the carnival was one of those casualties.

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