Mayor says officials working to bring back display next year
By Sarah Hall
Editor
There was no fireworks display at Paper Mill Island this year, much to the chagrin of Baldwinsville residents.
“This is incredibly disappointing and a huge fail on the part of the village,” resident Jonathan Ream wrote on the village’s Facebook page. “Our favorite activity of the year is to walk down for Fourth of July fireworks. Very sad to see this isn’t happening this year.”
Ream’s dissatisfaction was echoed by several others on social media.
“Instead of alive and bustling with business, B’ville will be a ghost town on Wednesday the Fourth,” Suzette West wrote on the village’s page.
Nor were the expressions of exasperation limited to outlets operated by the village. Others turned to the Baldwinsville Messenger’s page to note their discontent with the lack of a fireworks display this year.
“We need to make sure this gets fixed for next year,” wrote Dave Dixon. “Really bummed that there are none for the Fourth. I can’t remember the last time that was the case.”
Baldwinsville Village Mayor Dick Clarke said the usual display is put on not by the village itself, but by a promoter who works with the village.
“There was a number of years — my first five or six on the board — where one particular promoter, that was the only time he scheduled an event on the island,” Clarke recalled. “He would come in the first day that they opened up when you could sign up for a date and he would sign up for the Fourth of July. He didn’t even know who he was going to have play at the time, but he would have a concert and he would always have fireworks.”
While it was a different promoter working on the project the last few years, Clarke said, the show on PMI continued.
This year, however, the village is working exclusively with a new promoter, Chuck Chao of Creative Concerts. Creative Concerts has first rights to events on the island, and Chao must give permission to any other organizer looking to host an event, which Clarke said he’s been very willing to do.
“I don’t know exactly whether he tried for something on the Fourth or just didn’t have any luck getting people,” Clarke said.
Originally, the Baldwinsville Center for the Arts was supposed to have a fireworks show on July 5 as part of the festival held there this weekend.
“[The BCA asked] is there any way that the village would pay for them? And I said no, because… if you’re going to do it for one group you would [have to] do it for another,” Clarke said. “We have a lot of places to spend money. If there’s promoters out there who can find sponsors, that’s really the best way to go.”
Ultimately, the BCA was unable to find a sponsor. Organizers alerted the village about a week and a half before the festival, at which point it was too late to set up another display.
“Well, you can’t very well turn to somebody else and say, ‘Geez, would you like to throw on a fireworks display?’ Because you have to have some time to talk to fireworks people. And it has to go through the police department, there’s a lot of steps before,” Clarke said. “You can’t just throw fireworks out there, decide, ‘Let’s do it tonight.’ So we end up with nothing.”
Clarke said he understood residents’ disappointment.
“I’m disappointed, too,” he said. “I mean, I like fireworks just like everybody does. But we’ve already started working on next year.”
The mayor said the village can either work with Creative Concerts to set up a display at some point during the Fourth of July weekend or work in cooperation with the towns of Lysander and Van Buren.
“The two towns put on a free series every Tuesday,” Clarke said. “Maybe we could get them switched to Thursday next year because that’s when the Fourth of July is. [We could] give them the island for free and we won’t charge them a rent as our part of it. And they could find somebody to sponsor the fireworks and somebody, maybe our promoter, would help them find some music. And we’ll put something off.”
Clarke did note that, while he wasn’t trying to downplay people’s displeasure, the Paper Mill Island display is far from the only one in the area.
“The ballpark [NBT Stadium] has that,” he said. “They have it in Brewerton. They had it the other night at Gillie Lake in Camillus. They had it north of here, I think Saturday night… Fulton Speedway or somewhere up that direction. So there’s a lot of it out there.”
Clarke did agree that Baldwinsville’s fireworks were hard to beat.
“We always have a pretty good one and it’s right on the water, which makes it nice. It’s very easy to see. People can line the riverbanks and then see it. So I understand why ours is better than a lot of them,” he said. “So I want to keep them excited about coming to Baldwinsville so we’re going to try to make sure we have a show next year.”
