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Sarnia-area groups face tight timeline to spend provincial funding

Sarnia-area organizations could share a total of more than $250,000 in provincial funding for festivals and special events, if they can find ways to spend the money before the end of March.

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Sarnia-area organizations could share a total of more than $250,000 in provincial funding for festivals and special events if they can find ways to spend that money before the end of March.

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The four local groups are among 439 festivals and events to receive one-time funding from Ontario’s Reconnect program, previously known as Celebrate Ontario.

Victoria Playhouse Petrolia received the largest local amount at more than $116,000 for Music in the Air, an outdoor concert series.

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A LiUNA Yunity Festival received nearly $66,000 while Bluewater Borderfest’s Rocking the Runway received $56,000 and the South Western International Film Festival was awarded $18,000.

Mark Perrin, executive director of Tourism Sarnia-Lambton, said the community was fortunate to receive the funding and the groups are now “just determining if they can use the funds.”

The money has to be spent on events held before the end of March 2022, he said.

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The province says the money can be spent on programming and production, marketing, mobile applications and website development, and making sure health and safety measures are put in place to keep audiences safe.

“It is a pretty tight timeline on coming up with something,” Perrin said. “Obviously, no one wants to say ‘no.’”

Challenges include remaining public-health restrictions on audience size, as well as a limited amount of time before weather makes outdoor events a challenge, Perrin said.

“Typically, once you get to mid- to late October, you’re looking for indoor” events, he said, “and capacity indoors is still very limited.”

That leaves eight or nine weeks to hold an outdoor event, “which isn’t a ton of time” to organize something, he said.

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Perrin, who is also one of the founders of Bluewater Borderfest, said it’s looking at what an event “would look like and what’s available.”

The local group that organized outdoor music festivals in Sarnia before the pandemic held drive-in concerts featuring Big Wreck and The Reklaws last October at the airport in Sarnia.

Borderfest is scheduled to return in June 2022.

Perrin said there’s “nothing sort of concrete yet” about another Rocking the Runway event, but the group is discussing options.

He added Victoria Playhouse Petrolia is returning to shows with limited seating while the film festival is also planning for an event in the fall.

Perrin said the province added funding to the Reconnect program when more than 600 groups applied, compared to about 400 that typically applied to Celebrate Ontario.

“From a tourism perspective, there are a lot of events that are going to need support” from government, community sponsors and ticket buyers to get restarted after not being able to operate during the pandemic, he said.

“A lot of events have operated on shoestring budgets to begin with,” Perrin said.

“This funding definitely helps some of those more signature events in Sarnia-Lambton and, hopefully, they can work with different partnerships to bring everyone along and get some kind of programing out before the March 31, 2022 deadline,” he said.

pmorden@postmedia.com

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