Christmas lights will stay up on Palafox Street all year in downtown Pensacola. Here's why
The Christmas lights in downtown Pensacola will be lit on Wednesday for the holiday season, but not all the lights will come down after Dec. 25.
The lights on the trunks of trees along Palafox Street from Garden to Main streets will stay up all year after the Pensacola Community Redevelopment Agency approved another $25,000 for the Downtown Improvement Board to keep the lights up.
CRA board member and City Councilwoman Jennifer Brahier said she sponsored the measure that she said was inspired by an initiative Fairhope, Alabama, did in its downtown to keep decorative white lights up all year.
"It's just the white lights on the bottom side of the tree trunk," Brahier said. "So it's not getting up into the limbs, and it just lightens it up. And if they don't like it, they'll change their mind next year, if everyone doesn't like it. It's an opportunity to see if everyone likes this."
The proposal was met with skepticism Monday night at the CRA board meeting by other board members, but ultimately, the board voted unanimously to support it.
"I'm just not thrilled about the idea of keeping Christmas lights up all year," CRA Chairwoman Teniadé Broughton said.
DIB Executive Director Walker Wilson said the idea to keep the lights up was to attract more people downtown in the post-holiday season, which has traditionally been a slower part of the year for downtown merchants.
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"I think it'll be a benefit," Walker said. "It'll brighten up Palafox as well, not in your typical lighting sense, but there'll be more lights down there, which will be nice for folks trying to get around at nighttime. But I think it'll certainly be an added benefit downtown."
Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves, who cannot vote on the CRA Board, said he supported the idea.
"It wasn't too long ago that I would have been one of the businesses that would have liked to see something like this happen just to bring more people downtown and more foot traffic and all those kinds of things," Reeves said. "So I think for this amount of money, this is not a significant amount of money in the grand scheme, and if it creates another busier month, or busier week for business and sales tax and things like that downtown, I certainly think it's worth trying."
The downtown holiday lights will be turned on for the season on Wednesday with the kickoff of the First City Lights Festival at the seventh annual Holiday Haul on Palafox with a lighting ceremony in front of the Pensacola Museum of History at 5 p.m.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola Christmas lights will stay up on Palafox Street all year
