Creating gridlock downtown.

Go back 30 years.  Downtown Bend is half empty.  Me and Jerry, the shoe repair guy next door, put a table and chair on the sidewalk and play cribbage.  Once in a while we even have to get up and deal with a customer, but not often enough.

Flash forward to yesterday.  I'm locking my doors to go home for the evening.  I look left and right down the sidewalks and they're packed.  The streets are full of cars.  People are outside of every restaurant, every table filled.

This is the new normal.  Especially in the summer, especially on weekends.

What's more, these people are customers.  They're there to shop or dine or look around.

Everyone's happy.  The customers, the storekeepers.  It's nice.  It's what we work all year to see.

So what do the Downtowners in their infinite wisdom do?

We close down the streets.  For three out of four weeks in July, the peak weekends of the year.  We invite outsiders to come and take our customers.  We drive away our regulars.  We make the scene not about the stores, but about the outside vendors and free events.

These are no longer "festivals" but "pestivals," (as Kathy put it.)  The amount of disarray and garbage and dislocation and interference is immense.  Drunks spilling drinks all over the books, opening toy packages, entire families running wild, blocking the doors, but mostly not even looking our way, but looking into the street where the carnival is taking place.

I made twice as much money last weekend when the streets were clear as I did during the Bite of Bend.  Filling the streets with milling people may seem like a good thing, but it has the opposite effect.

We have taken something that was once needed and helpful and made them bigger and louder every year.

These pestivals are in the way.  They aren't needed.  They have worn out their welcome.  We succeeded in reviving downtown Bend, but now we're in danger of throttling it.

It's interesting to me that the store keepers in both Redmond, last year, and Sisters, this year, are starting to realize that these events aren't helpful.

I believe this is because they are relatively new for them -- and they can see the results starkly.  Unlike the Downtowners where it has been such a gradual evolution from festivals to pesivals, that they can't see it.  We're the boiling frog.

Not one of the originators of these events are still around.  But they keep on going, no matter how busy Downtown Bend is.

It is such an established thing now that I think they'll be impossible to get rid of.  Hell, the Downtowner organization is Proud Of Itself.  Proud.

I'll repeat.  I'm not against events themselves.  I am against closing the streets.  On peak weekends, inviting outsiders, while I'm the one who pays the high downtown rent all year long, including some very slow fall and winter days.

Please just let me do my business.