SLO County Art & Wine Fest is called off again. ‘We just can’t gamble right now’
What a difference a week makes: The three-day Art & Wine Festival that the Cambria Chamber of Commerce was still planning to host as of Jan. 7 has been postponed for a year and rescheduled for the end of January 2023. This year’s festival was to have begun Jan. 28.
According to chamber board President Mel McColloch, the difficult and painful decision made at an emergency meeting of chamber officials Friday was based on the staggering spread of COVID-19, a big leap in the number of positive cases and tests in the county and the alarming contagion rate of the omicron variant of the virus.
County Public Health announced in a news release Friday that “COVID-19 cases are at their highest level in San Luis Obispo County since the pandemic began, with 2,967 new cases reported in the past week, 3,573 current active cases, and a 14-day average of 342. This surpasses the previous peak of 331 in January 2021. These numbers do not include those who test positive through at-home tests or cannot access testing. The omicron variant now represents about 90% of recently sequenced cases in SLO County.”
The chamber canceled the same Art & Wine event in 2021 due to the pandemic. The festival has been held in January for about two decades.
Those with 2022 tickets to events, or participants who paid entry fees, will be offered two choices, McColloch said: They can apply their investment to the 2023 event, due to start Jan. 27 (thereby saving some money, since those costs and fees are expected to increase by then, he said), or the chamber will refund their money.
The Cambria chamber’s decision mirrors one made Jan. 8 by the Morro Coast Audubon Society, which, also for the second year in a row, delayed the 25th anniversary Morro Bay Winter Bird Festival. The many events in that festival had been scheduled to start five days later. Some of the birding presentations will be done virtually and offered free for anybody to watch at morrobaybirdfestival.org.
The birding and art-wine festivals had been in the works for months, or even years. Plans seemed to be on track until the omicron variant hit the country and the world like a medical tornado, wreaking health havoc and spreading much faster than previous variants, including the more deadly Delta variant.
McColloch said by phone to The Tribune that “there are so many unknowns right now. It’s really discouraging that we can’t have the festival again this year, but the decision had to be based on the safety of our visitors, staff, participants and friends. We just can’t gamble right now.”
The chamber officials determined that even the strict pandemic protocols they had planned to enforce at the art-wine festival might not have provided sufficient protection. Those protocols included requiring everybody to wear masks and show proof of vaccinations, plus organizers providing lots of sanitizing stations and having guides on site to encourage social distancing at the event locations.
