This year marks Guadalupe’s 75th anniversary as an incorporated city, and the community had big plans to celebrate this milestone with vendors, a parade, and even a mobile COVID-19 vaccine clinic. But event organizers announced Aug. 2 that the celebration would be canceled due to rising COVID-19 cases from the quickly spreading Delta variant.
“At a Zoom meeting on Aug. 1, 2021, with the organizers of the ‘Guadalupe 75th Anniversary Celebration’ scheduled for Aug. 8, 2021, the consensus of the group was to cancel the planned celebration,” a city statement said. “Since there are many unknowns concerning this variant, it would be best to cancel so that vendors, participants, representatives, etc., who were scheduled to participate in the celebration, are not held up in terms of their future planning.”
The statement added that the city supports the event planning team’s decision.
“Our mayor talked to some groups, and they were concerned about it. It was really ultimately the committee group that agreed it should be canceled, just to avoid any potential of spreading the variant,” Guadalupe City Administrator Todd Bodem told the Sun. “It’s really a bummer because they worked hard in a short period of time to put this great event together. We feel it’s in the best interest of the community.”
Bodem said there are no concrete plans yet to reschedule the event, but he added that the city is scheduled to meet with the planning committee on Aug. 5 to discuss possible ways to safely celebrate the city’s 75th anniversary.
“There’s a lot of history with the city,” Bodem said.
According to event planners, Guadalupe was first put on the map in 1840 as a land grant village “of a few souls,” and then became a Santa Barbara County township. In 1946, it became an incorporated city, so 2021 marks three-quarters of a century for the little town that now nears 8,000 residents.
The originally planned festival was set to feature 101-year-old Joseph Saucedo as the grand marshal of a parade that would close down Guadalupe Street in celebration. More than 50 booths were scheduled to line the streets of downtown, including bounce houses, games, a history hunt, arts and crafts, a raffle, local food vendors, and a COVID-19 vaccination tent. But out of caution, event organizers said the Delta variant has made things too uncertain to go forward with the celebration.
“The Santa Barbara County Department of Public Health has reached out to the event coordinators … to ask organizers and the city of Guadalupe to consider postponing the event because of the increase in COVID-19 cases in the county,” the statement said. “The event was expected to draw upwards of 2,000 visitors and participants, thus the concern for a COVID spread.”
County Public Health Department Public Information Officer Jackie Ruiz said the department will provide recommendations and input to event planning organizations if an entity approaches them asking for feedback.
As of July 30, Santa Barbara County had 403 infectious cases of COVID-19 in the community, a nearly 150 percent increase compared to two weeks ago. Of the 15 July tests sampled for the variant so far, two-thirds came back as the Delta variant.
This article appears in Aug 5-12, 2021.
