The city of Santa Clarita is looking to formally get inolved in the annual Santa Clarita Valley Fourth of July Parade, after organizers declared the burgeoning suburb’s longstanding summer tradition was getting too big for the volunteer committee from the local TV station.
In a May 4 letter to the city discussing his pride and history in the parade, Leon Worden — a longtime staple of SCVTV, along with his wife, Susan Shapiro — wrote how, for decades, the station acted as a hub that brought parade subcommittees together, which completed discrete and indispensable tasks.
However, times have changed, wrote the longtime historian, and “many longtime parade volunteers are no longer with us; most organizing functions are automated and/or handled by city staff; and the dramatically increased cost of insuring a huge community event that draws an estimated 25,000 spectators annually exceeds the means of a small nonprofit organization.”
For that and other reasons, according to city staff, the city of Santa Clarita is proposing that as of this year, the City Council approve “the transfer of ownership and responsibility for administering the SCV Fourth of July Parade from SCVTV to the city of Santa Clarita,” according to the agenda for Tuesday.
City staff also is recommending City Manager Ken Striplin or a designee create an agreement with SCVTV whereby SCVTV retains responsibility to determine the lineup order, designate the grand and division marshals, develop the script for the television broadcast and administer the judging process, at no cost to the city, per the recommendation by Tracy Sullivan of the city manager’s office.
City officials shared the same perspective as Worden, regarding how the “scope and scale of the parade have also evolved significantly.”
With a crowd the size of the parade’s, which is expected to exceed 25,000 people this year, “ensuring appropriate liability coverage and risk management protocols have become increasingly resource-intensive and beyond what can reasonably be sustained through a volunteer-led structure.”
Worden wrote that there are some functions, such as line-up, script for the broadcast and the judging of entries (but no trophies) that make sense to stay with the station.
But for the administration of an event that size, the city is much better-suited. He also said the entry fees should cover most of the city’s cost.
“Upon the transfer of ownership, parade entry fees, if any, would be collected and managed by the city of Santa Clarita,” he wrote in his suggestions for the merger. “Historically, entry fees have covered the cost of incidentals such as trophies, signage, portable toilets, and stipends for contracted musical entries. Ownership of current operational resources including the parade website (SCVParade.com) would transfer to the city.”
The parade was first created in 1932, according to SCVHistory.com, a local archive run by Worden.
He did mention a request in his letter: He asked the city to retain “Valley” in the event title, “as the parade has always been for everyone without regard to municipal boundaries.”
