Illume festival takes a break this year

The Coromandel Illume Winter Festival of Light is taking a hiatus this year, but is expected to light up the skies again in July 2018.

The organisers of the community event, which has run successfully for the past two years, regretfully announced their decision to not hold the event due to insurmountable challenges with staging the event in 2017.

"The key challenge is that this year we don't have an event manager," says a Coromandel Business Association (CBA) spokesperson. "We are interested in talking to businesses who would like to partner with the CBA, to help deliver a bigger and brighter event next year."

A community meeting to discuss the future of the event and to gauge community and business support will be held in May.

"We understand this is a hard knock for businesses in Coromandel Town, who benefited from having people in town over winter, we support the Association's decision for a hiatus," says our Mayor Sandra Goudie. "It is a better solution than trying to pull something together that may not have the absolute support from the community that it needs to be successful."

Because the festival isn't going ahead this year it means that the Major Events funding flagged for Illume will no longer be available for the event and will return the funding pool.

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