The crowd is pictured during the Great Lakes Folk Festival in East Lansing on August 13. The Great Lake Folk Festival is produced by Michigan State University Museum to promote diverse music cultures.
—As construction projects overtake downtown, the MSU Museum and East Lansing have decided to put the Great Lakes Folk Festival on hiatus.
The event, held annually downtown since 2002, will be put on pause for one year. However, there could still be occasional "pop-up" musical performances over the summer, MSU Museum director Mark Auslander said.
"We knew there needed to be a hiatus at some point, and this seemed like a really good time to do it," Auslander said. "Given all the concerns and challenges, it gives us a chance to figure out how to rethink the festival."
It appears if the Great Lakes Folk Festival returns in 2019, some major changes might be in store from previous iterations — changes as drastic as changing or removing the word "folk" from the festival's name.
There's a concern about the lack of diversity in the audience at the festival, Auslander said, so efforts will be made to draw a crowd that fully represents the East Lansing community.
Beyond attendance, he said he also hopes to see a wide-ranging coalition of organizers who will have a say in who performs at the festival as well.
In the future, the festival will work "through the Human Relations Commission to really make sure that people of color, from starkly disadvantaged or excluded communities, really have a voice in the planning," Auslander said.
Auslander said the Great Lakes Folk Festival did not have as strong of an economic impact on downtown merchants as organizers would have hoped, as outside food trucks were brought in, which took away revenue from local restaurants.
The festival is usually held in mid-August, a timeframe that does not bode well for attracting MSU students, many of whom are still at home on summer vacation. Auslander said rethinking those dates is something that will be considered as organizers seek to reboot the downtown mainstay.
Auslander said the city's current budget crunch has nothing to do with the hiatus. East Lansing had proposed cutting off cash assistance to the festival as it looks to curb costs and pay off its growing unfunded pension debts.
The city provided $35,090 in cash support and overtime staffing for the Department of Public Works and East Lansing Police Department for the event, according to a list of budget cuts distributed at January's community budget discussions.
The museum director said this funding was never taken off the table, and — as it composes only around 5 percent of the festival's budget — it likely wouldn't have been a deal-breaker anyways.
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