Lisle residents, as well as the thousands of visitors who flocked to the village for the annual three-day festival over the 4th of July, will have to find other ways to celebrate this year.
The Lisle Kiwanis Club, coordinator of the Eyes to the Skies festival and parade for the last two years, announced this week that an ”inability to generate adequate, acceptable funding” has led the group to cancel the event. Kiwanis President Stanley Szachnitowski said the club`s members regret being unable to sponsor the festival, which he said was a major fundraiser for a number of service organizations in the village.
Szachnitowski said, ”The bottom line was that funding, public or private, was not sufficient to protect the Kiwanis Club from financial liability while putting on the kind of festival that we thought that Lisle wanted and deserved.”
Eyes to the Skies in the past included a parade, fireworks, food booths, music and the hot-air balloon races that inspired the name. The Lisle Park District had managed the event until 1990.
The Kiwanis Club had asked the village to donate $63,000, including security and cleanup costs, toward a total projected cost of $209,000 for this year`s festival.
Village trustees voted March 16 to donate $45,000, down $35,000 from last year`s contribution.
Last week, Kiwanis Club members met with representatives of two investment companies who indicated that they would be willing to finance the festival in return for control of the revenues it generated.
Both companies had indicated that they would charge an admission fee, club members said.
Festival managers had never before charged admission and, Szachnitowski said, ”In these recessionary times we don`t particularly want to start now.” Szachnitowski also said that the Kiwanis had concerns about the legality of using village and park district money to generate revenue for what he called a profit-making venture.
Lisle Mayor Ronald S. Ghilardi said he regreted that the Kiwanis Club had ”felt it necessary to withdraw their sponsorship of this year`s festival.”
Ghilardi said village trustees had made ”what we thought was a very significant financial contribution” to putting on the Eyes to the Skies festival.
The mayor said he remained hopeful that an organization in the village would offer the community some kind of 4th of July celebration this year.
”I think that many Lisle residents will be disappointed if there is no 4th of July festival at all this year,” Ghilardi said, ”but I`m not sure how many will be displeased if 100,000 people don`t show up for a three-day extravaganza.”
