With Halloween more than nine months away, the city of Madison has already created six options for the future of next year’s celebration.
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz; Police Chief Noble Wray; City Attorney Michael May; Ald. Mike Verveer, District 4, and some Associated Students of Madison members met Dec. 15 to analyze Madison’s Halloween celebration.
According to the meeting’s report, prepared by Wray and May, the goal of the meeting was to discuss “options to eliminate the Halloween party or reduce Halloween problems.”
With no press allowed at the meeting, Verveer said the report is a compilation of strategies that have been used successfully by cities across the country holding similar large-scale events.
“The report is not at all a list of recommendations,” Verveer said.
Six options are included in the report, with the most severe plan suggesting a halt of the entire Halloween event by shutting down access to Madison at all major intersections. In addition, an identification card proving residence would be required to access certain parts of the city. While this method was successful in Boulder, Colo., Madison’s geography makes shutting down access to major intersections difficult.
Ald. Robbie Webber, District 5, does not believe this is a good option. However, according to Webber, there are many competing interests at play. Many businesses make money on Halloween from the out-of-town and out-of-state visitors, and many businesses may lose money due to property damage, she added. Webber also noted fewer than 20 percent of lawbreakers on Halloween were University of Wisconsin students.
“There is no perfect answer, but people who live here need to start standing up and saying to people from out of town, ‘Not cool. You don’t get to trash my city,'” Webber said.
Announcing the event is limited to UW students is another potential solution that would create a block party-style celebration on Langdon Street. This option would exclude citizens of Madison and students from surrounding colleges, such as Madison Area Technical College, from the event.
Mike Danforth, a MATC junior, said he believes all Madison residents should be included in the Halloween tradition.
“I think that it would be a bogus decision to exclude students from MATC,” Danforth said. “A lot of them feel just as much a part of State Street and downtown Madison as UW students.”
Other options discussed include closing off the State Street area, closing down all businesses on State Street, eliminating the sale of kegs and closing off the 500 block of State Street. The final option was to continue working with UW students and administration to plan for Halloween 2005.
Despite the six options, the Halloween committee will continue to meet in an effort to keep the Halloween tradition alive. According to Verveer, the committee plans to meet after the Madison Police Department finalizes an “After Action Report” detailing the events of Halloween 2004 and what actions had been successful.
With Halloween 2005 months away, Verveer remains hopeful.
“It’s a tradition dating back to the 1970s and is fairly successful up until the final hours,” Verveer said. “We need to mend it, not end it.”
