Jeepers, Duncan -- you're the crabby old man in the neighborhood.

Why....you whippersnapper!

Duncan, do you think that the Cascade Classic bike race and the upcoming road nationals bike race bring in $3 million to the local economy? (As mentioned by Doug La Placa in his letter in the current version of The Source) Do these events bring money into hotels and restaurants at the cost of lesser business to downtown businesses? In other words, is there in fact a net gain to the economy from hosting these events? For the record, I'm a fan of bike racing and not at all against these great events being held in Bend. But I never thought about whether it would take business away from some. Your thoughts?

You know, probably.

But my point is this constant creeping promotions. There are roughly 13 peak weekends in the summer, which we pay high rent all year to reach, and it seems like the other downtowners are determined to distract the consumer as much as possible.

O.K.

There are hundreds, thousands, of 'worthy' events -- there are at least that many non-profit charity events -- and so on, and all you have to do is say yes to 13 of them and the summer is completely taken over.

Some businesses do well, some don't. But what does it say that my neighbor Pave, who as far as I know is a supporter of such events, is closed on a Saturday when they would usually be open. Is that vote of confidence? Or that just about every business on this street had closed by 4:00 yesterday. And so on...

So years ago, the city council put a limit on the number of events downtown, and -- or so I thought -- on how many times they could close the streets.

And yet, here we have yet another street closure next week.

We have a Twilight Criterion become a Downtown Criterion, starting 4 hours earlier, and so on and so forth.

It's like saying yes to one thing, and that is somehow a greenlight to do a dozen more things....the logical conclusion is just to close the street permanently, have a festival all year long, and close the stores

So who is the lobby for these things.

Apparently, everyone but me.

The Public: pretty big lobby right there, huh? What am I trying to do, take away people fun? Be, as Jack says, a "crabby old man?"

The Media: who loves to cover these things, as well as advertise them.

The Sponsors: who make money from these events.

The Vendors: who love being able to pay for just a couple of weekends and get the absolute maximum number of customers without the bother of a full time lease.

I've also often said, if you schedule these events outside the "peak" weekends, then it might actually PULL people downtown.

I saying that we have absolutely no trouble getting people in on non-event summer weekends. In fact, I had a record number a weekend ago...

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only downtowner to feel this way, but they don't want to take the unpopular position.

I've given up, basically, that it's going to change.

In fact, as I said, I think it's not going to end until they have closed the streets on all 13 weekends.

So, I'm willing to discuss this in a nice calm manner. Not rant against it like I would've 4 or 5 years ago. What would be the point? It's not going to change anything.

Nowadays, I just factor it in to my plans. I try to be cheerful about it.

I guess my comments are catching my real tone: which is completely fatalistic.

Like I said, that which I can't change....

Unmmm......these comments ARE NOT catching my real feelings, which are fatalistic.

Sincerely.

I suspect the way this phenomenon has developed is that back in the mid-1980s when downtown was dying on the vine, the merchants were desperate to do ANYTHING to bring people downtown, so they started having special events. (The First Friday Gallery Walk was one of the first, as I recall.) And then they just sort of got carried away.

I have no idea (and it probably would be impossible to tell for sure) whether these events help or hurt downtown businesses in the long run, but one thing that would concern me is "even fatigue," i.e., the possibility that there will be so damn many of things things that people will get blase about them. I think in fact that's already starting to happen. Every weekend I'm like, "What, ANOTHER damn festival?!"