This August, the traditional Festival of Fireworks won’t be filling Jaffrey’s night sky, organizers announced last week.
During the Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Dinner on Feb. 15, the chamber, Silver Ranch Airpark and Atlas PyroVision announced that the festival, which annually draws tens of thousands of visitors to Jaffrey, has been suspended this year.
Cathy Furze, who chairs the Festival of Fireworks Committee, said it’s not the last Jaffrey will see of the event, or something similar. The Chamber is already planning a large fireworks events for 2023 and 2026, to coincide with the Jaffrey 250th Jubilee Celebration and the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. But, at least for the foreseeable future, the event will no longer be an annual celebration.
“It was a long, hard, difficult decision to make, and it was not taken lightly,” Furze said.
The event has long been the Chamber’s biggest annual fundraiser, with the money raised being put back into the community through nonprofit donations, community contributions such as the purchase of the Rail Trail, purchasing the current Chamber of Commerce building, funding for Santa’s House and running the chamber.
Rising costs and a lack of volunteers are the main reasons the event has become unsustainable, the chamber announced in a press release issued on Friday.
Furze said it’s become a struggle to gather enough staff to organize the event. Not only does the Festival of Fireworks rely on between 70 to 80 volunteers on the actual day, but a group of 15 to 20 meet throughout the year to do the planning.
And increased security needs for the event has driven costs up.
“Security is something on the top of everyone’s mind these days, and with security comes a cost,” Furze said.
Public safety concerns have become more of a focus for the festival after a bomb threat in 2012 caused the event to be called off. For the years following the threat, organizers sought to tighten security for the event, not holding the festival in 2013, and moving it to a new location on the Cheshire Fairgrounds in 2014 and 2015, before returning the event to the Silver Ranch Airpark in 2016.
At its most profitable, the festival would net about $30,000 to $35,000 for each of the three partners, according to Cyndy Burgess, who was part of the team who revived the fireworks in 2014. It had slowed down a bit before the bomb threat, but afterwards, the revenue loss was dramatic, Burgess said.
Furze said the Chamber decided the festival needed to pull in a minimum of $12,000 in revenue for the Chamber after expenses to make the event worthwhile. In the past few years, it’s raised between $6,000 and $8,000.
“It was good while it lasted, but all good things come to an end,” Burgess said. “We haven’t taken in anywhere near the revenue we were years ago. It’s a lot of work, and for the kind of return we were getting, and the amount of work we were putting in, it ended up being not worth it.”
Harvey Sawyer, who operates and manages Jaffrey Airfield Silver Ranch along with his wife, Lee Sawyer, said the Festival of Fireworks never fully recovered the height of its popularity after the 2012 incident. Increasing costs and a decline in ticket sales has made it difficult for the event to be a viable fundraiser. At its height, he said, the proceeds from the event, which are shared between the Chamber, Atlas and the airpark, were enough to cover the costs associated with it, such as shutting down the airpark for set up and clearing away the event, but that hasn’t been the case in more recent years.
Matt Shea, vice president of Atlas, said the company has been involved with the event since 1991, when the Chamber established it as the Festival of Fireworks. He agreed with Sawyer that the 2012 threat was a turning point for the event’s profitability as a fundraiser. Each year, Atlas donated all the fireworks for the event, and received a portion of the proceeds to help cover other expenses such as labor and insurance.
“After the festival bomb threat, things changed,” Shea said. “Attendance was down, expenses were up, particularly the safety expenses. We brought it back, hoping to continue this as a good thing for the organizers and for the community. And I think it’s still very good for the community, but it became something that was taking resources away from the Chamber, and the attendance wasn’t there, and the amount of fundraising the Chamber used to get wasn’t there.”
Despite the flagging attendance, Sawyer said, he’s sad to see it go. While the Chamber has been running the Festival of Fireworks for nearly 30 years, similar fireworks displays during the Jaffrey Jubilee Days stretch back much further than that – displays have been held at the airpark since 1949, Sawyer said.
“It’s what makes Jaffrey a community, these kinds of events,” Sawyer said.
Shea said the end of the annual Festival of Fireworks won’t end the partnership between Atlas and the town. In addition to contributing to the Jaffrey 250th Jubilee Days and the 250th anniversary of the United States, Atlas will also be donating fireworks to an upcoming fundraiser for the Jaffrey Parks and Recreation Department in April at Franklin Pierce University, featuring the band Recycled Percussion.
“We’re absolutely still going to be contributing in Jaffrey. Just in a different way,” Shea said.
Furze said the Chamber of Commerce is discussing alternate fundraising opportunities and will be supplementing existing programs with new family-friendly events. Those events have not yet been finalized, and will be announced through the Chamber of Commerce’s Facebook page when appropriate.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.