Eugene Celebration on hold

What’s Eugene without a Celebration?

Well, the city is apparently about to find out, as Kesey Enterprises announced Tuesday that after 31 years the annual event that showcases Eugene’s colorful and eccentric ways — and once got the ubiquitous Slug Queen on the cover of The Wall Street Journal — has been canceled.

In putting a positive spin on the elimination of the event that was to have taken place Aug. 22-24, Kesey Enterprises said in a statement that the celebration’s cancellation “ironically” is a result of the “growing momentum of Eugene’s downtown revitalization.”

Last year’s celebration was the first produced exclusively by Kesey Enterprises, a for-profit company, with no oversight from the city or the now-defunct nonprofit Downtown Events Management Inc., or DEMI.

The success of the 2013 celebration, coupled with the presence of such new downtown structures as the Broadway Commerce Center and Lane Community College’s expanded Downtown Campus, left too little room to operate a 2014 celebration, the company said.

The other apparent sticking point was the effect the celebration was having on some downtown businesses.

When there were empty storefronts aplenty, it was no problem finding space for a food booth outside such locales, Kit Kesey, Kesey Enterprises’ president, said in a telephone interview. But last year, many of the those food booths were in front of new businesses.

“They love the event, but they really don’t want to be compromised for a weekend,” Kesey said of some downtown businesses. “The two things just didn’t mesh.”

Assessing whether to go forward with a 2014 celebration “has been a four-month effort, and I just said ‘We can’t do it,’” Kesey said. “We’ll have to re-do it. I just said we need to take a little hiatus on this and look at re-doing it in 2015. I’m a downtown business owner, and I didn’t think it was fully responsible (to do the celebration this year).”

Kesey said he’s adamant that the celebration will return in 2015.

“I’m trying to look out for the long run in everything that we do,” he said. “A re-envisioning is really in order.”

There is still a chance that the event’s signature feature, the Eugene Celebration Parade, could still happen, Kesey said. The wild and wacky parade, which features the city’s new Slug Queen riding high in all her glory, would likely take place on Aug. 23, he said.

“The parade is out there as a thought,” Kesey said. “It’s the most eclectic, the most interesting, the most diverse element of the celebration, in my opinion.”

The annual Slug Queen coronation, scheduled for Aug. 8 at the downtown Park Blocks, will definitely go on, said reigning queen Brandy Todd, aka Professor Doctor Mildred Slugwak Dresselhaus.

“Well, certainly we’re disappointed,” said Todd, assistant director of the University of Oregon’s Oregon Center for Optics, about the cancellation of the celebration. “But we are the slug queens, and nothing will stop us,” she said of the coronation of a new queen and the prospect of a 32nd annual parade.

The queens might even take over the celebration and create a whole new one, Todd joked. “In replacement of the Eugene Celebration, we’re going to have the EuQueen Celebration.”

Mayor Kitty Piercy, asked to comment during a break at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting, said she’s disappointed to learn of the celebration’s cancellation.

“It’s their decision,” she said of celebration organizers. “It’s unfortunate that the success of our downtown will require them to reinvent the Eugene Celebration.”

The celebration is an important community event that draws people from all over town “to smile and enjoy themselves,” Piercy said. “It’s very important that it come back together as soon as possible.”

Piercy said she’s hopeful that, at the very least, the celebration parade can go forward. “I will follow up on that,” she said.

The first Eugene Celebration was held Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 1983. It was a civic party borne of the city’s enthusiasm a year earlier for the opening of the $22.5 million Hult Center for the Performing Arts. The festival’s creators also hoped it would instill some community pride during a recession that was most evident locally in the collapse of the wood products industry.

It was billed as Eugene’s biggest party in 30 years, since the old Oregon Trail Pageant saw its last hurrah in 1950.

During its first two decades, the celebration had a 20-square-block footprint that stretched from Fifth to 10th avenues and from Charnelton to High streets. It had nine stages (compared to three in recent years) for musical acts.

It also had a 2.3-mile parade route, more than twice the length of recent years’ parades, and, of course, the invention of the Society of the Legitimization of the Ubiquitous Gastropod and all the slimy weirdness that entailed.

That first celebration also received $45,000 in donations, as well as $8,000 from the Eugene Downtown Commission and $5,000 from the Eugene Private Industry Council.

By 1997, the still-city-run event regularly drew tens of thousands downtown and had a budget of $435,000. But it relied on dwindling hotel and motel tax revenue and just $25,000 in tax support, a product of property tax limitation ballot measures.

The celebration was saved in 1998 when DEMI was created, and the city agreed to loan the nonprofit agency $150,000 and Centennial Bank agreed to sponsor it. For the next three years, it was the Centennial Bank Eugene Celebration.

Kesey Enterprises won the contract from DEMI to run the 2008 celebration. Kit Kesey said at the time that his goal was to eventually return the celebration to its glory days.

With the dissolution of DEMI, Kesey Enterprises, which owns and operates the historic McDonald Theatre downtown and contracts with the city to put on summer concerts at the Cuthbert Amphitheater, was on its own last year.

Nonetheless, Kit Kesey said the 2013 celebration was profitable and a big success in many ways.

“It went perfect,” he said. “The event was outstanding.”

Follow Mark on Twitter @delmont5 . Email [email protected] . Reporter Edward Russo contributed to this report.