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DALLAS — The annual Dallas Harvest Festival is on a hiatus as road projects in Dallas Borough and Dallas Township take root.
The Dallas Harvest Festival would have celebrated its 13th season this September but three major projects — a street-scaping project and construction of a roundabout in Dallas Borough, plus Dallas Township’s Upper Demunds Road realignment — have postponed the street fair, said Elizabeth Martin, Dallas Harvest Festival Committee member and Dallas Township supervisor.
The mid-September festival had attracted crowds up to 8,000 to Main Street in Dallas, providing a boost to the local economy by highlighting local businesses.
Lyn Carey, owner of Earth and Wears, a small business featuring handcrafted items on Main Street, was often a vendor at the festival.
“My shop has been located a few doors up from the festival for seven years and many people did not know I was here,” Carey said.
The festival has helped her acquire “many new customers.”
“The festival was nice for the community,” Dominick Fino Jr., of Fino’s Compounding Pharmacy in Dallas, said. “It provided an opportunity for people to come together and created awareness of the different businesses here (in the Back Mountain).”
Canceling the fair was not an easy decision, said Tracy Carr, Dallas Borough manager.
Moving the festival temporarily to another location such as the Misericordia University campus was considered, Martin said. But fear of losing the dynamics of a “small community street fair” convinced committee members to cancel the event for this year.
“Dallas Borough is our umbrella — the (Dallas Harvest Festival) committee never became a 501C3 nonprofit themselves,” Martin said. “The festival was always about highlighting the downtown area.”
The festival held on Main Street in front of the borough’s municipal building used the borough’s and neighboring Citizens Bank parking lots for vendors.
The street-scaping project will utilize part of the borough’s parking lot as a staging area, Carr said. The project, involving sidewalks repairs, handicap accessible ramps improvements, planting of trees and gardens, crosswalks and new street light fixtures, is scheduled to start this year. Carr said the project must be completed before the roundabout, “so everything will line up with PennDOT’s construction.”
The Dallas Roundabout, encompassing a five-way intersection with Main, Church and Lake Streets and Route 415 and the Upper Demunds Road rerouting project in Dallas Township, is slated to begin in spring 2016.
Jenelle Ostrowski, an assistant liaison engineer of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, said bids for both projects will be collected in January 2016.
Ostrowski estimates the roundabout will take three years to complete. The Upper Demunds Road realignment is expected to be completed in a year.
The Upper Demunds Road project involves rerouting the road to intersect with Route 309 near the entrance to the Dallas Municipal Building — alleviating traffic congestion at the intersection of Hildebrandt Road, Church Street and Route 309.
The Dallas Harvest Festival will not be buried under the upcoming construction projects, Carr and Martin said.
“We have a fabulous group of (festival committee) volunteers,” Carr said. “We will do our best to evaluate the project’s progress every year.”
