DNC Delegate Welcome Party To Be Held at Summerfest Grounds
Delegates and guests will be treated to lakefront experience night before convention opens.
Mayor Tom Barrett announces the location of the DNC welcome party. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.
The Henry Maier Festival Grounds will be the place to be on July 12th.
The Democratic National Convention’s delegate welcome party will be held at the lakefront festival grounds. The party, held the night before the convention opens, will be open to the approximately 6,000 delegates and their guests.
“This is the first impression that they will have of our community and what better place to have a first impression than at the Summerfest grounds,” said Mayor Tom Barrett.
Barrett also made sure to praise the host committee staff. “I want to praise the host committee because they have been working around the clock to get ready,” said the committee chair. President Liz Gilbert and chief of staff Adam Alonso were fired Tuesday evening following the opening of an investigation into a toxic work environment.
But Friday’s press conference was upbeat. “We really love a great party in Milwaukee,” said Summerfest chief operating officer Sarah Smith Pancheri. Guests will be on the grounds shortly after “the Big Gig” ends. The annual music festival is scheduled to run from June 24th through July 5th this year.
Barrett fielded questions after the brief press conference, emphasizing that he was looking forward, not backward. “If anything, what this has done is brought the team more closely together,” said the mayor. He said a decision on whether the findings of the ongoing investigation would be made public was up to the organization’s five-member board.
The Mayor said he wasn’t concerned about the investigation’s impact on fundraising. “We are actually ahead of where other communities have been,” said Barrett.
The party is one of the key responsibilities of the local host committee, in addition to fundraising to host the convention, securing 15,000 volunteers, hosting a welcome party for media members and a post-event volunteer party.
The convention itself will be led by a separate entity affiliated with the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Convention Committee.
The convention will be held from July 13th through 16th.
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I think that, since Summerfest (the festival) denies that it is part of a public/private partnership and they will not pay for their own police protection, we should quit calling the venue the “Summerfest Grounds,” and call it by its proper name, the “Maier Festival Park.”
Maybe, if the City refuses to pay many millions each year to provide Floridian Don Smiley and his non-partners mates a safe place at which to take their millions from, Summerfest might move to Chicago or Waukesha or somewhere else. Nashville? Austin? The World’s Biggest Music Festival has transcneded its birthplace. It is huge, like its ego, and says it is no longer really part of Milwaukee, anyway. Let ’em go to wine country in NorCal.
Those prime dates would be quickly filled by Festa or PrideFest or other truly local, fun festivals that would not cost the city nearly so much to protect.