Santa Maria Downtown Fridays ends year three
The final Friday of the year for Santa Maria’s Downtown Fridays attracted another large crowd to cap off the third year of the weekly festival and farmers market that runs from March to September.
Three years of an ongoing effort by the City of Santa Maria and partners in the community to bring people to the downtown area for live music, fresh food and fun for the whole family.
Organizers say they’ve seen crowds of more than two thousand people every Friday night during the 27 weeks of the event at the Town Center West shopping center parking lot near the intersection of Broadway and Main Street.
“Complete support of the city, complete support of the local businesses who’ve been involved every year who make this happen”, said Downtown Fridays lead organizer Ed Carcarey, “because as you know this is free admission and free parking, but yet everything still has to get paid for, so somebody has to pay for it all to make sure it’s free for everybody to come to.”
Carcarey says the event is evolving but is here to stay perhaps with some changes.
“A city the size of Santa Maria and not having a festival like this, whether you want to call it a farmers market, or festival or street fair, having a weekly event every year, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have it”, Carcarey said, “one of the things we’re doing tonight is the Chamber of Commerce and the City of Santa Maria are going to be out here doing a survey for us, they’re going to be asking people, what do they want to see? What is it that we don’t have that they’d like to have? What do they want more of? Is it the venue, do we need to change, do they want different times or do they want it on a different day?”
“We’re going to ask a lot of questions, we’re going to go over it with the city and the Chamber over the next couple of months, figure that out, sit down with everybody, make some hard decisions, maybe we do move it, or maybe we do change times, I don’t know yet”, Carcarey said.
