CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Due to the inclement weather, and hazardous driving conditions, the city has cancelled the Friday night Grand Illumination.
“Unfortunately, we decided to make the difficult decision to cancel the event for this evening,” said city spokesperson Afton Scheider to Cville Right Now.
Nobody with the city can speak to if this has happened in years past, but David Dillehunt, a longtime City Communications worker, said he’s “not aware of any cancellations or postponement in the decade or so that our team has organized the event.”
The city is considering holding the event at a later date.
“We are looking to possibly reschedule for next week and we’re going to let people know as soon as possible if we can make it happen,” he said.
Schneider said, as in the city announcement on its website, the safety of attendees, performers, vendors, and staff is the paramount consideration.
“You know, behind the scenes we plan this event for months and it includes a lot of work with the police department, the public works team, vendors, staff, just making sure that people are available to fully and safely staff the event,” Schneider said.
“It would have looked really pretty to have a little snow on the tree, but we need to make sure people are safe getting there, leaving there, and also the setup involved,” Schneider said.
She explained, “We have some vendors coming from Lynchburg, Richmond, even setup vendors as in the infrastructure of getting TING Pavilion ready to host everybody, so unfortunately some of those people couldn’t make it happen.”
“And again, safety’s our priority, so out of an abundance of caution we made this decision,” Schneider said.
The city right now, even with the event not happening, is trying to get the Downtown Mall cleaned up.
The event would just add to the issues of cleaning up.
“It’s slushy, it’s a little icy, and we don’t want to have trucks rolling down the ramps and people slipping, falling, anything, so we just want to stay safe,” Schneider declared.
She said city leadership is reconvening Friday afternoon toward possibly arranging the Grand Illumination next week, but they need to find out if all the moving parts can be coordinated to achieve a rescheduling.
This leaves the Lighting of the Lawn as the only game in town as years past, both Lighting of the Lawn and the city’s Grand Illumination have occurred the same night.
The UVA event is totally student-organized and is likely to go on as planned.
