Bloomin’ Artfest Delayed Until 2013

If you've been looking forward to this year's Reisterstown , you're going to have to bloody wait.

The annual event that features art vendors, music, food and community organizations has been postponed until 2013.

Organizers site a lack of manpower and advanced planning for why the festival, which usually takes over the grounds of for a weekend in late May, was canceled this year.

“The letters to the vendors and to the sponsors  had to go out in January and the letters didn’t go out,” said Calvin Reter, a member of the committee since the festival’s inception eight years ago.

“Since it can’t be done right this year, we’d [rather] not have it,” he said.

Planning meetings had very low attendance and the festival’s chairperson, LuAnn Day, had stepped down from her position. Reter appointed himself chair in an attempt to save the festival, but even the meeting he called to declare whether or not the festival would be held had low attendance.

“We were having meetings with four or five people showing up,” said Glenn Barnes, president of the Reisterstown Improvement Association.

Although it was suggested months ago that the , the partnership never quite took off, although the festival donated $1,400 to the association.

Reter said the RIA should take the lead for 2013.

“When we started this eight years ago, there was no community organization in which to do this, so we formed a committee and then committee put on the Bloomin’ Artfest for seven years,” Reter said. “Now we have a community organization, the Reisterstown Improvement Association.”

Reter said a meeting will be held in December to determine the fate of the 2013 festival. Barnes is determined to get it going for next year.

“We definitely don’t want it to go away; we want to continue with it,” he said. “There just wasn’t enough people willing to participate.”

In the meantime, Main Street activists will shift their focus to getting a farmers market up and running, an idea that has been tossed around for awhile. Barnes hopes to hold a farmers market on Main Street from mid-May through the fall.