At the Wednesday afternoon meeting the board approved street closures or just lane closures for several public events.
These included parts of Adams Avenue for Haynie’s Corner Porchfest and the Eykamp String Quartet New Traditions series and Signature School closing parts of Main Street for fundraising activities.
This board is responsible for approvals for events large and small. You can’t hold Fall Fest without closing a large swath of Franklin Street on Evansville’s west side.
“Each organization is required to put forth a new request each year for the event that they are proposing,” Board President Mike Retter said. “Then it's reviewed by the board and the decision’s made on whether to grant that request or not.”
“Generally, what we are doing is closing the major downtown city, the downtown streets and so again, whether it be for the Fall Festival, for various neighborhood events, sewer work, various kinds of things.”
Because public safety is involved, the board also includes representatives from the police and fire departments and building commission. If it's a larger project they may bring someone in from the city engineer's office.
They also oversee police and fire department purchases and liquidation, and vote on requests for proposals to demolish blighted structures in the city.
Retter said when considering approvals, sometimes they have to table an item to look into it.
“There have been numerous situations over the years where we've had to do that in order to get a better understanding of the situation before we made a board decision on that project.”
This is especially true for requests from individuals to close a street or a lane for a wedding for example.
“Those are the ones we kind of take a little more in depth look at in order to see what kind of traffic issues it causes.”
They try not to set a precedent by approving several personal requests for lane closures. Most requests are from non-profit organizations.
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