Civic holiday festivities not rosy for all

The Heritage Railway and Carousel Company is frustrated after running empty over the Civic holiday weekend.

The Summer in the Park Committee and the North Rocks the Bay concert promoters are both calling the Civic weekend festivities along the city’s waterfront a great success, however, not everyone is singing from the same song sheet.

The Heritage Railway and Carousel Company saw a stunning drop in ridership for what has traditionally been their busiest weekend.

“On an average weekend on a Friday we would do between 800 - 1000 rides on a Saturday and would average 1000 to 1500 Sunday would be an equivalent to that,” explains Dan Pigeau, Operations Manager at the Heritage Carousel.

“On Friday we didn’t even hit 200 rides and on Saturday we won’t hit the 200 either and I don’t think we’ll hit 200 for Sunday. Yes this weekend used to be our largest weekend of the whole year and now it’s not, the last two years now it’s just going downhill, and this year is even worse than last,” he adds.

Pigeau says to take a major hit like the premier tourist attraction took on the long weekend will seriously impact the groups bottom line, as well as the retention of volunteers.

“We’re all volunteers, so it is not so much the wages it is for the cooperation out of our volunteers, because if they come in and do nothing they think twice about coming in the next time, so it’s hard when they come in and do nothing and it’s hard to convince them to keep coming back,” he states.

“And if this is going to happen again on another weekend like this, we’re just not going to have it (carousel & train) open because our volunteers just won’t come in.”

“It hurts our revenue big time, because this weekend here if you look at our past weekends we’ve had, our festival weekends, we’re going to be down an easy $7,000 maybe $8,000 by the time the weekend is over. Plus our expenses for being open, so it all adds up and at the end of the year you don’t have that revenue to work with,” adds Pigeau.

Pigeau also is concerned that the city and event organisers negotiated with the Boat so that their patrons had access to the restaurant without issue, but that the same courtesy was not extended to the area’s premier tourist attraction.

“It was never brought to us to have that opportunity of being separate from the festival, the gates are put up and we learn to deal with it and that is just the way it is.”

“We’ve tried in the past to get some cooperation out of them for when we’re here, it just doesn’t seem to work they're more interested in the bands being played then us being open.”

Pigeau says the members of the Heritage Railway and Carousel will assess the numbers later this month at their regular meeting and make decisive plans around the 2009 Civic long weekend.