At Wednesday’s City Council meeting on City Finance and Services, a motion for a one-time grant to fund Italian Day on Commercial Drive this summer was passed unanimously.
The Italian Day Festival Society was seeking $60,000 as a city-wide agreement with FIFA stripped the festival of vital sponsorship revenue by taking over local street banner advertising spaces on Commercial Drive.
“We were very pleased to see unanimous support from council for this emergency one-time funding for Italian Day,” said Melissa De Genova, the President of the Italian Day Festival.
“I think the message came through loud and clear that there needs to be a conversation with the City of Vancouver and many festivals including Italian Day about how we continue to sustain the rising costs considering the city grants for the festival.”
With the grant, Italian Day no longer has to scale back its festivities.
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“Obviously there are certain things that we can’t compromise on. For instance, public safety. That’s not something we would even consider. When it comes to our cultural activities, that’s where we would have had to have scaled back and made some really hard decisions.”
But the grant from Vancouver City Council has helped relieve the pressure the festival was facing, though there are still some concerns.
“The rising costs that are unique to Italian Day activating at the same time as FIFA, for example, where usually we’d have access to more traffic authority personnel, we may not have those same… We’re looking at different public safety measures at a higher cost to us.”
Italian Day sees over 300,000 people along Commercial Drive every June.
“We’re hoping that that everyone comes out to join us for Italian Day on the drive on Sunday, June 14.”
With files from Raynaldo Suarez