CHARLESTON, W.Va.—— Due to heavy winds and the cold, Mayor Amy Shuler Goodwin made the announcement Wednesday afternoon, to postpone the Charleston Christmas Parade that was originally scheduled for Thursday December 5.
Chief of Staff for Mayor Goodwin Matt Sutton was on 580 Live Thursday morning, and he said that it came down to safety.
Matt Sutton
“That always becomes the number one priority, is can we do it safely,” Sutton said. “And as we began to track the weather and we began to talk to various individuals, including our Homeland Security Director Chad Jones and our event coordinator and parade coordinator Miranda Dillion and others it became clear that we weren’t going to be able to do this safely tonight.”
Along with safety he said that it was a pretty easy decision because if they had people pull out of the parade than it wouldn’t be as big as it should be.
“It really wasn’t a difficult decision at the end of the day, because one is we want as many people to participate as possible, so if people were going to start to not participate than that makes the parade less than what it should be,” Sutton said. “People weren’t going to bring out their kids, and we have a lot of staff members who have very young kids and just asking them are you willing to bring your kids out and then they start saying no, then that’s very clear to us that it’s not safe but were actually not as good as a parade we want to have.”
And while the parade has been rescheduled for the same day as West Virginia University’s bowl game, Sutton said that they had to make sure that the date didn’t align with any high school activities.
“Another thing that we do, is really desperately want our local kids, and the bands and the art groups to be able to perform, so we had to work with Capitol High and George Washington High to make sure that they didn’t have performing arts going on that day,” Sutton said.
Photo courtesy of WOWK-TV