Verona Hometown Days 2012 – No More?

[moparkid25]

Rumor has it that the city of Verona will no longer be hosting the annual Hometown Days celebration. This means no parade, no festival, NO BEER TENT, and quite possibly no car show. This is always a good show, and I hate to see it come to an end with the expulsion of the regular Verona Hometown Days.

I know one member of the Sugar River Cruisers, and I am going to try to contact her in the coming weeks. It would be cool if they continued the show at the Fire Dept anyway, or even moved it to another location. Years ago, they used to do there show here in Mt. Horeb, but the Summer Frolic committee didn’t support them. The Springdale Lutheran Church had a show last year that went well, and they are going to continue it again this year. I would vote to have the SRC come back to Mt. Horeb, but if they kept things going at the VFD even without Hometown Days, that would be cool too.

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[GTO Man]

I am surprised that Verona will no longer be hosting the Home Town Days Celebration. Must be an economic issue. Hopefully someone can step up and take over the car show. I would like to see it go back to the park in Mount Horeb.

[circletrack]

Hometown Days
Will it or won’t it?
As of this week, the odds of Verona having a festival the second weekend of June look good. But unlike in years past, it’s anything but automatic.

No matter what happens, the nonprofit, all-volunteer festival known as Hometown Days is gone, having voted itself out of existence in October when members of Verona Community Betterment could not find people willing to take prime leadership roles to make the festival happen.

For years, most of the responsibility for planning and execution has landed on a handful of people, and new members are few. So facing another year like that, last year’s group decided to shut down and hope for an alternative.

Two months later, Verona businessman Brad Zaugg, who had bought the folded women’s magazine Brava two years earlier, was ready to announce he was ready to make a run at keeping the festival alive. The catch was that any profits would go to the magazine and its parent company, which also puts on three expo events a year.

Some argue there’s nothing wrong with that – after all, a professional coordinator such as what the Optimists briefly considered hiring would take a salary in much the same way. And in fact, Zaugg’s plan involves the same community groups in essentially the same way as before.
But whether the community can accept such an arrangement remains to be seen.

After all, Hometown Days has always been an event where people who might otherwise make plans for the week stop by and chip in, partly out of a sense of community and camaraderie, partly out of a sense of duty toward charities that have helped make the community what it is.

Betterment alone pumped more than $100,000 back into the community over the past decade, funding Welcome to Verona signs, helping the Harriet Park shelter get built and contributing to large projects for the fire department and senior center.

But Betterment is no more, and after 40 years, Hometown Days is still not a certainty.

[Author]

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