HARLINGEN — The time may still not be right for major city-sponsored events.
The Downtown Improvement Board on Tuesday tabled a proposal for a daylong festival which would be held next month.
The board discussed plans for the Jackson Street United Harlingen TX Festival to be held Feb. 27 from noon to midnight downtown.
But board members voiced concerns about whether such an event could win approval from Mayor Chris Boswell and the city administration due to rising COVID-19 infections.
Alexis Alaniz, downtown director, noted that backers of the temporarily suspended Market Days would have a strong case for those events to be reinstated as well if the United Harlingen fest was approved by the city.
“Market Days is also going to want something to be approved like that, too,” she told the board. “It’s going to be proposed to the mayor, and if he accepts it, we will follow through and have an additional board meeting to approve the event.”
At the meeting, Assistant City Manager Gabe Gonzalez told the board approval for such a festival during a resurgent COVID-19 infection rate would be a hard sell to the mayor and city officials.
“Let me just chime in on that real quick,” Gonzalez said at the board meeting Tuesday. “This morning the city manager canceled an event that we had scheduled that was only going to be for about 40 directors.
“It was going to be indoors but because of the spike in COVID cases that we had, especially over the weekend, we had 600 cases, he decided to cancel,” Gonzalez said, referring to the 620 cases confirmed in Cameron County over the past weekend.
