Palmer Fest Raises Concerns In Regards to Future Street Festivals

   Ohio University’s Fest Season of 2012 has aroused many concerns involving future fests and the safety of not only the students and visitors, but the Athens’ community as well.

Photo Credits: Joel Prince. www.athensnews.com

The first fest that took place this year was High Fest. From personal experience, this is the most tamed festival of the season. According to The Post (thepost.ohiou.edu) only eight arrests were made before the fest ended up dying down by about 9 pm.

   The weekend of April 27^th, one of the most popular fests of the season would raise a strong debate between the Athens community and Athens city officials in regards to safety. Although Palmer Place Fest ended smoothly with minimal arrests, it’s “Big Brother” fest made eyebrows raise.

   Palmer Fest is well known throughout the state of Ohio for being one of the biggest parties of the academic school year. People from all over the state (including surrounding states) attend Palmer Fest to seek possibly one of the best party experiences of their life. With every house having multiple kegs for free to the public, anything can go wrong. Although there are free kegs at any fest you attend during the season, what made Palmer Fest such a disaster is the people visiting here whom seek the best time of their lives and abuse the fact that police cannot intrude on private property.

   At 11 Palmer Street around 7 pm, arsonists took action in the basement of a party house opposed to a couch in the middle of the street, which would ultimately shut down the entire fest. The riot control remained calm until people started throwing bottles at the police. When this occurred, the riot control was called and responded by shutting down the entire Palmer Street and its festivities. This incident raised a question to the Athens community, where over 200 people gathered at College Green to discuss the debate of future fests and how to keep our community safe (athensnews.com).

   While some people argued to ban fest season all together, others offered solutions that would keep fest season a tradition, but make the community safe at the same time.

   "People from out of state always come here ... because of our party school reputation. They always just go as hard as they can and they're the ones who usually are making the story lines and making the problems here," - OU freshman Colin McCollough 

   In my eyes, this is our biggest problem when it comes to fests becoming out of control. People who visit here do not care about the well-being of our community and they treat our city as if they’ll never come here again. According to Athens Police Department, more than half of the arrests that were made during Palmer Fest happened to people who didn’t attend our school. And almost all of these arrests were outstanding charges, whereas the arrests made on students who attend OU were minimal charges such as open container.

   So how do we tame the parties to prevent the termination of Fest Season and still let the Athens Community come together?

   Control the amount of unwanted visitors! From personal experience, Halloween in Athens is the best time to party. It’s arguably one of the best times to party as a community in Athens. I believe that how the City of Athens handles the visitors for Halloween, should be applied to all major fests during the season. That is, every member of the Athens community must sign up their guest and only be limited to one guest per student. Doing this would give our community a better sense on who’s on our campus, and if tragedies such as 11 Palmer continue to occur, we can possibly catch the people who vandalize and treat our campus as shit!