Jaime Chapman, the executive director of Midtown Reno, is hard at work helping organize this year’s upcoming Dancing in the Streets, which will take place on July 12th, as well as keeping the revitalization of Midtown going.
“We do cleanups to make sure that the streets are clean and there's no garbage,” Chapman said during a recent interview.
“And we do that with different events and partnering with other people that want to come in and have events here and then supporting the small businesses if they've got an idea, different things like that," Chapman explained.
Chapman has a degree in outdoor recreation sports management and is well known as the founder of Pineapple Pedicabs and Travel Pineapple, offering fun guided tours of the Biggest Little City.
This will be the fourth year for Dancing in the Streets, for which a reported 28-thousand people showed up last year with South Virginia street closed down for a mile. This year, nine different stages with different styles of music are being planned.
There’s currently a promo on the MidtownReno Facebook page for what is called a “Double Down & Dance Package,” with the tag line “Stay, play, and slay all day at Dancing in the Streets!”
It includes access to a “luxury room” at the Best Bet Motor Lodge, all access to the Reno Sauna Club, merch, gift cards, and other extras with prices in the $800 to $1000 range “for a serious upgrade to your festival experience.”
What do you think of creating a tiered luxury experience for what is a free outdoor festival?
At Our Town Reno, rather than having all this hustle for creating exclusivity and imbalances among festival goers, we would prefer the city help out more for such homegrown events.
One area of its budget the City could save on is picking local artists with lower commissions than recent out of town artists picked for extremely highly priced projects.
Bloated salaries could also be reduced, as well as unnecessary positions and costlier and costlier police services.
Interview and photo by Monica Moran with commentary by Our Town Reno