No fireworks at Memorial Park this year

For the first time in three decades, Colorado Springs and its residents will go without a Fourth of July celebration at Memorial Park, another casualty of the city's budget cuts, a city spokeswoman said Tuesday.

"It's a sad tradition to lose, without a doubt," Sue Skiffington-Blumberg said.

"Tough times require tough decisions, and this is one of those, along with many other tough decisions about our park resources, that had to be made."

The Fabulous Fourth event, which regularly draws tens of thousands of people, is considered the crème de la crème in terms of Independence Day celebrations in the Pikes Peak region.

Although Memorial Park will be dark this year, the show will go on.

Fort Carson, which puts on a fireworks show annually on July 3, is partnering with the city so that people have a place to celebrate - even if it isn't on the Fourth of July.

"We're trying to make it a little bit bigger knowing that the city is not having a celebration on the Fourth," said Dee McNutt, a public affairs officer for Fort Carson.

The Colorado Springs Philharmonic, a staple of the Memorial Park celebration, is moving its act to Fort Carson.

Nathan Newbrough, the philharmonic's chief executive officer, said there was talk of pushing Fort Carson's celebration to July 4th.

"They have a tradition of doing this on the third because the Fourth is a day off for everyone," he said. "When you're looking at the world of Fort Carson, it makes more sense to do this on the third."

Newbrough said he's grateful that Colorado Springs will be able to celebrate Independence Day, regardless of the date or location.

"In this economic time and understanding the fact that the city is not able to maintain full funding in some areas, it's something we all just need to understand," he said. "Certainly, none of this is ideal. But we feel fortunate that we can still come out and celebrate with our city that we love so much."

The Fort Carson celebration will be at Iron Horse Park. Newbrough said the programming will start at 4 p.m.

Newbrough said it costs between $80,000 and $100,000 to put on a fireworks show at Memorial Park. When asked if it was too late for a donor to step forward, Newbrough said it wasn't but that the event would have to be fully funded. Still, he expressed doubt about someone forking over that much money.

"In this economy, who can count on that kind of thing happening?" he said.

Skiffington-Blumberg said the mayor and other people typically raised the money to pay for the fireworks, and the city donated services like police and emergency medical technicians. She said the city also provided portable toilets and cleaned up afterward.

"It runs into the thousands," she said.

The City Council decided to make the cut in January, she said.

"This was not done lightly," she said. "We're still trying to bridge a gap of a couple of hundred thousand dollars that we'll be looking at closely over the course of the rest of 2009.

"Everybody is going to have to give up something," Skiffington-Blumberg added. "For some people, this may be the one thing every year that they counted on their municipal government to provide. Under today's circumstances, we just can't do it all any more."

The last time the city cancelled the annual fireworks show in Memorial Park was in 2002, when a laser show was substituted for the Roman candles that normally lit up the sky on Independence Day because of high fire danger from a severe drought.