GILROY
– The city is a lot quieter two days after the 25th Gilroy
Garlic Festival ended and its more than 130,000 visitors left, but
there is still plenty left to do for volunteers and organizers of
the festival this week.
GILROY – The city is a lot quieter two days after the 25th Gilroy Garlic Festival ended and its more than 130,000 visitors left, but there is still plenty left to do for volunteers and organizers of the festival this week.
“Everything’s getting back to normal,” said festival President Janie Mardesich Monday afternoon, sounding quite relieved that the party had finally ended. “Oh, my God, I have bills?!”
Meanwhile, at Christmas Hill Park Refuse Committee Chairman Armondo Gonzalez was in the process of getting the mess cleaned up.
“We’re working 12-hour days,” said Gonzalez, who is in his first year as refuse chairman. “Today the kids came in at 7:30 and they just got out of here at 4:30. There was more that we could do, but they had enough.”
While most of the trash left at the park has been removed, the Gilroy High School basketball and wrestling teams and the Gilroy Gators swimming club have been hard at work picking up trash in parking lots, paths and everywhere else around the park.
“We have a huge job ahead of us,” Gonzalez said. “We probably filled four or five trucks and that’s just today. We’re going to be done by the end of the day tomorrow. We may need to come back Wednesday just to sweep through.”
Gonzalez said the kids from the organizations have worked hard to get the job done, and he plans to reward them with a trip to Coyote Lake once they finish their job.
“It was a great effort between them,” he said. “I’m really proud and really happy with all of them. I’ll take all the kids up to the lake, and we’ll go wakeboarding and have a good time when it’s done.”
All told, 132,651 people came to the park this weekend. Attendance was up by at least 1,500 visitors each day from last year, with 26,909 in on Friday, up from 24,232 in 2002; 58,726 Saturday, up from 55,545; and 47,116 Sunday, up from 45,632 last year.
Final statistics for food, beer and wine sales are expected later this week, but festival organizers are hopeful that this year exceeded expectations.
The Gilroy Chamber of Commerce estimates 400 to 450 kegs of beer were sold during the weekend.
“For the most part, I know we’re very close to or a little over last year,” Chamber Executive Director Susan Valenta said.
Over at Gourmet Alley, where workers continue to do their process of cleaning up after serving tons of calamari, shrimp and pepperstaek sandwiches, chairman Hugh Davis was reluctant to talk about his estimates of sales of dishes, but he thought that the new dish, garlic ginger chicken stir fry, had done as well as expected.
“Our plan was to get 4,000 servings of the new dish, and I think we got about 4,100,” he said.
With nearly 60,000 people at the park Saturday and Sunday, the California Highway Patrol had its hands tied trying to get people both in and out of the festival at a reasonable rate, but traffic problems were down, overall.
“I think, as a whole, it went without problems,” said Terry Mayes, CHP public information officer.
Mayes said she could tell – without even hearing the final numbers – that Saturday was by far the biggest day at the festival.
“We had so many people incoming,” she said. “We had 18 cars a minute going in at 5 p.m. Saturday. It slowed us down getting them out.”
Three new traffic lights on Santa Teresa Boulevard hurt CHP’s effort, and railway traffic caused backups on all westbound lanes coming from the highways. Despite the efforts of 21 CHP officers helping to keep traffic moving, some of the delays were unavoidable.
“When you have four trains, that backs them up,” Mayes said. “We can only push people in so fast one lane at a time.”
After a Saturday evening that didn’t go as smoothly as the CHP and festival organizers hoped, Sgt. Dave Hill met with the parking committee to find a better way to get the cars in and out for Sunday.
“What we did was modify the main gate out to be two lanes out a lot earlier,” she said. “The change and all of the routing is a collaborative plan Garlic Festival board, parking committee and the Highway Patrol.”
While there were a fair share of backups once drivers got to Gilroy, the new lanes on U.S. 101 helped keep traffic flowing well for visitors from the north.
“The worst it got was basically backed up to San Martin,” Mayes said. “Some people said it never got backed up farther than Leavesley.”
While the CHP chalked this year’s festival up as a success, with no major accidents related to the festival, Mayes said officers will look at continuing to improve the traffic flow in town.
“Next year, we’ll probably look at a few more changes going out so that we don’t have people fighting their way out, all for a couple inches. There were a few incidents Saturday but not Sunday (after the routing change in the parking area).”
