Scott City won't handle beer sales at Summerfest

For this year's Summerfest, Scott City wanted to take the lucrative beer sales into its own hands as a way to provide more money to organize next year's annual summer celebration.

This year the city formed a fair board to administer Summerfest to relieve the burden on the park board, which organized the festival in past years. One goal was that the fair board would be able to oversee alcohol sales at the festival, but city attorney Frank Siebert said the board wasn't able to file the needed paperwork with the Missouri Department of Revenue in time.

Parks department director Phyllis Crump said less money will come in for next year's Summerfest than was hoped, but the way the festival will go off Friday and Saturday will be mostly unchanged.

The one significant change, Crump said, is that the parade that kicks off Summerfest's second day Saturday will be held in the afternoon just before the festival resumes. In past years the parade was held Saturday morning, beginning in the Bob's Foodliner parking lot on Main Street and ending at Scott City Park, leaving fairgoers with nothing to do in the early afternoon before the fairgrounds opened at 4 p.m.

"There wasn't really anything going on," Crump said. "The people dissipated and went their own way."

This year the route is the same, but instead of starting in the morning, the parade lineup will start at 2:30 p.m. with the parade beginning at 3:30 p.m.

This year will only be the second year Summerfest will include carnival rides as part of its attractions. Other than those changes, everything else is traditional: the Friday night pageants, karaoke contest and washers tournament; the Saturday night talent show, live music and fireworks. Crump said this year's talent contest has drawn an extraordinarily large number of contestants -- more than 30.

There will be plenty of spectators to watch, too. Crump said Scott City shows great support for Summerfest, with large crowds both Friday and Saturday nights. The measure of success, Crump said, is the healthy business done by the vendors who rent space at the festival.

"All the concessions people keep coming back," she said.

msanders@semissourian.com

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