Drawing People to Our Wonderful Town

In order for our small town to grow and thrive we must have destination businesses and events that draw people to us. While doing this, it is critical that we respect and honor the events -- such as Friday Night Live and WinterMarkt -- that we already have.

Herndon is a small town in the middle of a lot of significant and varied offerings -- Reston, One Loudoun, Tysons, etc. It is great to have our own Metro stop (finally!), but there has to be a reason for people to get off the train or otherwise come visit us. This means we have to have destination businesses that people want to come visit. Those might be unique restaurants, special businesses, unique art exhibits, etc. As a town, we have to do more to make it easier for such businesses to establish themselves here and be successful.

Similarly, we should be striving for events that people want to come to. Friday Night Live and WinterMarkt come to mind as the two biggest marque events, but we also have a number of things happening at Arts Space, Next Stop Theater, our parks, and through the many community organizations and businesses that call Herndon home. As a town, we should be finding ways to support and publicize these events to the larger region.

I also would like to see some new events or the return of some past events but ultimately these will require that our community steps up to organize and run them. The Town's ability to do this is limited and its resources are better spent in providing a solid framework, reasonable policies, and general support to these efforts. Some of the things I would love to see include some form of rebirth of the Herndon Festival, a Labor Day event of some sort (the wine / beer thing was enjoyed by a lot of people), and a truly multi-cultural festival similar to what Reston does.

When encouraging these new events and businesses though it is important to protect and honor the existing, successful ones we already have. The "majority" of the current Town Council chose to attack the decades old Friday Night Live program which is arguably one of the most successful events in the region in terms of longevity, volunteers, funding, organization, advertising, etc. They wanted to force the sponsoring organization to not only give up some Fridays but actually for them to use their resources to do alternate music formats. That is not a fair ask and would have ultimately damaged the FNL brand as "Herndon Rocks".

I am not opposed to the idea of mixing in some alternate music formats on Fridays, but those should be organized and run by appropriate organizations. Ideally, these events could pilot on Saturdays or another night in order to demonstrate feasibility and sustainability of the concept. Also, the Chamber might be able to provide some guidance and advice to new programs (that is consistent with their mission) but that is a discussion that should be happening between them and the would be organizers -- not something being pushed on them from Town Council Members who believe they know best from their seat on the dais.

There also has been a lot of discussion about the cultural mini-festivals established under this current Council. In theory a great idea but we need to be consistent in how we support them. The Council established a clear policy about how these would work, maximum funding, etc. only to have the "majority of council" create special exceptions for their pet projects. This creates an uneven playing field and potentially discourages others from considering events here.