Changes to This Year's Event
/Changes to Napa Porchfest 2019
Statement from the Napa Porchfest committee on changes to this year’s event.
Imagine: July 2011, a warm summer day in Napa and the inaugural Porchfest event. 12 porches, 2 dozen bands, and maybe 300 people. No water, no volunteers, no food trucks, no t-shirts but it was a great success. An awesome free event for Napa, with Napa musicians on Napa porches. And the word spread……
Fast Forward to July 2018, a warm summer day in Napa, 64 porches, 126 bands/musical acts and more than 10,000 people in the Fuller Park closure area alone. (That is 1/4 the number of BottleRock participants on any given day). It’s still an awesome free event for Napa, with Napa musicians on Napa porches. All brought to you by a small group of volunteers.
Porchfest 2011
Permits Required
Through the years, increased crowds have increased concerns for safety and traffic flow. The sale of Napa Porchfest t-shirts enabled us to provide needed medical care and the desired food and water that attendees asked for.
In the last few years the city has closed streets in an effort to make our event both fun and safe for the people of Napa. Porchfest day-of volunteers were trained to assist residents to navigate closed streets, answer questions for attendees, and have picked up trash thus, keeping the neighborhoods clean. The need for refuse/trash maintenance, emergency services, and traffic control has grown to be unmanageable by this small group of volunteers.
Safety | Rogue Porches & Bands
Our priority is the safety of all the attendees. Our obligation is to adhere to the laws and ordinances of the city. Unfortunately, there have been rogue porches/bands, and some registered Porchfest porches/bands, that have created problems for us by taking it upon themselves to shut down streets not approved by the city.
What they failed to understand is that an event of this size requires special permits - the same type of permits that are required for all the other events that place in Napa. By shutting down unapproved streets, closures were left without protection or safety precautions in place.
Our resources were stretched too far because we were still forced to respond even though we did not create these issues. Though not intended, this sort of thing has given the even a bad reputation and this is why we must adhere to the terms of our permit.
We Still Rely on T-Shirt Sales
While we still rely on Porchfest t-shirt sales to finance most of this event in the past couple of years we have been fortunate to receive generous sponsorships from a few organizations and businesses that have allowed us to keep the event manageable, even if just barely.
With all of this in mind and in cooperation with the city the Porchfest committee of Napa County Landmarks, Inc has made significant changes to the location of porches to ensure the viability of Porchfest in the future.
We’re Looking for More Porches
We know there are displaced bands looking for a place to play. We ask you to register yourself on napaporchfest.org as a band without a porch as we are going to try to recruit more porches within the closure area for the event. And if you are a homeowner in the closure area, we would love to have you adopt-a-band via our website.
Your Porchfest organizers are a small but dedicated group (eight in total) and are un-paid volunteers who invest months of personal time to make this event happen. A few are professional promoters but the rest of us are not. We have day jobs that have nothing to do with music although we are all lovers of live music. We are the epitome of grass roots. We do this for fun and because we believe in the event. It is definitely a labor of love.
We ask for your patience and your support.
Sincerely,
The Napa Porchfest team
Bringing you an awesome free event for Napa, with Napa musicians on Napa porches!
2019 Napa Porchfest Boundaries