South Bend Mayor James Mueller says last weekend’s Fusion Fest at Howard Park was a big success, and the event will be back next year.
Mueller said the city learned some things. Having more than one ice cream vendor and more cold drink stations would have shortened some lines for those items, which were popular with all the sun and warmth.
But Mueller said about 30,000 people came through the gates, and many people remarked how safe and welcomed they felt.
“Any way you do the math there, whether you think they’re all from South Bend, that’s about a third,” Mueller said. “Or if you think it’s of our county, that’s over 10 percent of our county. That’s a wonderful turnout and the diversity that we saw, this was the entire community coming together and enjoying time together.”
While there wasn’t the level of fighting and disorder toward the end of Saturday night -- the kind of troubles that led the city to end the festival’s past iterations – the city did decide to cancel the fireworks. That was partly because of group of teenage girls got into a fight, but also because a boat was anchored in the St. Joseph River in the fireworks’ fallout zone, and police were starting to have trouble with their radios, the mayor said.
