Miners Days moving to July

By Nikki Jamieson
Sunny South News

In an effort to avoid conflicts with other festivals, Coalhurst Miners Days will be taking place in July this year.

The date change was discussed during the presentation of Christy Henning’s Director of Community Development Report, during Coalhurst town council’s regular March 19 meeting.

When asked about the discussion for Miners Days, town CAO Shawn Patience said the Miners Day Committee had initially made a decision during an earlier meeting to move the date to go a week earlier. However, there were no representatives from Parks and Recreation or from the Carter Club at the meeting, so they couldn’t provide feedback then.

“In discussions with our MLA (Joseph Schow, Cardston-Siksika Constituency), MP (Rachel Thomas, Lethbridge), they suggested they would have an overlap with Picture Butte’s festival that weekend, which would (…) take some adjustments,” said Patience adding, “and of course, the County would have the same issue with their floats, ect.”

After that meeting, the Town’s Parks and Recreation department informed the committee that they would not have volunteers available for that weekend, and the car show had advertised for the same weekend as it had went on last year. Patience said the date discussion went back on the committee’s agenda last week, during which there was a “fairly lengthy conversation”, at which time the committee discussed potential options for dates in July, August and September, before unanimously agreeing to move the festival to the July 27-28 weekend.

“The only opposing festival that weekend is in Magrath, which we didn’t think would have a significant impact,” said Patience. “They were very adamant about moving it away from Whoop-Up (Days) and Taber Cornfest weekends. Taber has expanded their music festival, and it’s now up to three days, a very large event. And as much as I expressed council’s concern was that we have an event for residents, they also felt that residents would be attending some of those other festivals as well, and made the decision to Move Miners Day – which we would be publicizing shortly.”

Other items that were part of the report included a verbal grant announcement. Hemming said that on March 18, the town was notified that they received a grant of $600 from Volunteer Alberta for their Volunteer Appreciation event. 

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