Stanley music festival canceled for 2nd time this year – Post Register

No Sawtooth Valley Gathering will take place in Stanley this year, after the event was fully canceled by its organizer and city of Stanley officials last week.

The outdoor music festival had already been moved from its original July date to September this year because of the coronavirus. Now it’s tentatively planned for July 29-Aug. 2, 2021.

Festival organizer James Fowler and Stanley City Council members discussed the event during an Aug. 4 special council meeting held via phone.

When the decision was made to not hold the event in July, city leaders and Fowler agreed to re-evaluate the “placeholder” dates of Sept. 9-14, Fowler said. With the headliner band canceling a couple of weeks ago, he was weighing his options.

“We’re at that point we want to take another hard look at it, with COVID” surging in Idaho, Stanley Mayor Steve Botti said. “It’s gotten worse, not better since June. Cases have skyrocketed in our health district,” although not in Stanley, he said. “The risks have gone up, not down.” Because large gatherings are known to be one of the situations where coronavirus can easily spread, Botti was concerned about holding the festival, but he didn’t want to wait too long to make a decision to avoid putting Fowler up “against a wall.”

Fowler said while he had developed a safety plan for the festival that included requiring people to wear face masks at the concerts, plotting the field out for physical distancing and ending the music at 10 p.m., he couldn’t control what people do once they leave the festival area.

“What we can’t control is what happens at the end of the night,” Fowler said. If 1,000 or so people head downtown or to campgrounds to congregate “we’re potentially enabling a bad situation. I don’t feel good about it at this point. I’m comfortable pushing to 2021 at this point.”

Councilwoman Laurii Gadwa suggested the city and Fowler jointly agree to cancel the 2020 festival “and hopefully it will proceed in 2021.” Gadwa endorsed the suggested dates of late July into early August 2021 “with the caveat that if COVID does not change, we still have the right to cancel within 30 days of the event next year.”

“I know people enjoyed it,” Botti said. “This just wasn’t the year. It hasn’t been the year for a lot of things.”

“I’m just super bummed about it,” Fowler said. “I hope we can have it next year.”