After a nine-year break, the City of Richmond, B.C., is hoping to restart its popular tall ships festival in June of 2011.
During the last tall ships festival in 2002, an estimated 400,000 people turned out to see a fleet of sailing vessels from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, as part of a five-day maritime festival.
But in recent years the city, which is located south of Vancouver, has been focused on preparing for the Olympics, according to Councillor Harold Steeves.
Now that the Games are over, the council wants to keep the momentum going, by using up some surplus money from the Olympic O-Zone budget to restart the tall ships event.
"We actually brought in our Olympic programs on time and below budget. We actually had a saving of $900,000 thousand dollars in our Olympic expenses and that money is the seed money for doing the tall ships," said Steeves.
But despite the surplus cash, one change planned for the new festival is a new entrance fee, which could be as high as $15. But Steeves said the city is hoping to attract sponsors to reduce the price of a ticket.
A similar festival in 2005 in Vancouver ended up bankrupt, after only 20,000 people bought tickets to the five-day event.
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