The Parke County Covered Bridge Festival is underway and runs through next weekend. There are attractions in nine communities in addition to the 31 covered bridges located throughout the county. Bill Pickett has more on the festival…
And with such big crowds, you would think that Parke County makes a lot of money off the event. But the president of the Parke County Board of Commissioners, Jim Meece, says that’s not the case…
{AUDIO: “The county has never made any money off of this. The only thing the county now charges is a thing called a transient merchant license. It’s so expensive to put this on – to pay for the tents, the extra police, the extra ambulance, the porta-pots, the trash – all of those expenses you don’t think about. And it’s just not fair to put that on Parke County people who don’t participate in the festival. And in fact, to some of those folks it’s a real pain to have this going on. It’s in their way.”}
Meece is participating in his sixty-ninth Covered Bridge Festival as one of the vendors on the square in Rockville. He says a decision was made about twenty-five years ago to allow quality vendors from outside the county to participate along with local vendors.
Meece added some people wonder why Parke County has so many covered bridges….
{AUDIO: “It’s because we were a poor county. These are perfectly good bridges. We still have – of our thirty-one covered bridges – we probably have twenty-five that are still doing traffic every day. People drive on them every day. We have all these bridges because we never saw any reason to throw away a perfectly good bridge to build some concrete and steel thing. And it’s turned out to be a double-edged good sword for everybody. It’s a good deal.”}
This year’s Parke County Covered Bridge Festival runs through next weekend.
For more information visit www.coveredbridges.com.
