POTTSTOWN >> Evidence is mounting that there will be no Independence Day celebration in Pottstown this year.
At Thursday night’s meeting of the Pottstown Metropolitan Area Regional Planning Committee, Borough Council President Dan Weand opined “it doesn’t look like there will be anything this year.”
Just before the meeting, he was observed speaking outside of Pottstown Borough Hall with Marcia Levengood, co-chairwoman with her brother William Smale, of Independence Day Ltd., which has organized the event in recent years.
Contacted Thursday, Levengood said she would not confirm Weand’s statement, but did say her organization “is preparing a press release” about this year’s event.
Asked about the subject of the release, she said “you’ll know when it comes out.”
However, Pottstown Borough Authority member Aram Ecker informed a Mercury reporter that Smale stopped by a job site and told him “it looks like no celebration for Pottstown.”
Weand told the regional planners Wednesday night that the event costs a total of about $50,000 and that poor fundraising had doomed the traditional parade, celebration and fireworks display.
He asked the surrounding seven towns that are members of the regional planning group – West Pottsgrove, Lower Pottsgrove, Upper Pottsgrove, East Coventry, North Coventry, Douglass (Mont.) and New Hanover – to consider making small contributions – “about $7,000 from each town” – toward next year’s event.
He said that would help maintain Pottstown as “the center of a wagon wheel,” the place where outlying township residents come to get together and be entertained.
Upper Pottsgrove Commissioners’ Chairman Elwood Taylor suggested that towns could help keep costs down by contributing police presence for the day, particularly given that is one of the larger costs borne by the event.
Taylor also suggested “pro-rating” the contributions so that towns with smaller populations would not be contributing the same as larger towns. He suggested a rate of “25 cents a head.”
Whatever help surrounding towns might offer, it seems unlikely to come in time to save this year’s celebration.
Last year, thanks to a sizeable contribution from Sly Fox Brewery, left-over funds from the previous year and a newly aggressive effort to market fund-raising efforts by homecoming queens in Pottstown and surrounding school districts, the annual parade was marked by the much-anticipated return of the fireworks.
Earlier this month, however, the first signs that the celebration was in financial trouble came when Independence Day Ltd. issued a press release saying the event was “in jeopardy” and citing the borough’s refusal to waive the $8,700 parade fee as one of the contributing factors.
The borough fired back with its own release, saying the fee has never been waived in the past and the change to require payment up front was partially the result of the delay by Independence Day Ltd in making payment the previous year.
The Independence Day events in Pottstown began in the 1970s under the guidance of Bob Urban, former editor of The Mercury.
It was subsequently taken up by a community based committee that ran the event for several decades.
