The on-campus concert originally planned for this spring has been pushed back to next fall after organizer decided they didn’t have adequate time to prepare for the original date in late April. The $27,000 in student activity fee funds the Student Senate allocated for the event will be rolled into the next year.
Dan Welter, coordinator of student activities and the main staff organizer of the concert, had said he and the student committee tasked with organizing the concert would choose an artist by mid-March. The concert was roughly scheduled for the end of April. But Welter said that timeline eventually proved unrealistic, and they had to reassess the concert after missing several planning deadlines.
“We knew that it was ambitious to try do in spring from the beginning, but the hope was we would be able to pull it together,” Welter said.
The concert is tentatively scheduled for late September.
The Student Senate allocated the $27,000 for the concert in January after Welter originally brought forward the idea in December for an on-campus concert. TJ Williams, then the vice-chair of the Student Senate, had a role in allocating the money for the original timeline.
“We knew time was short, but we hoped they could pull off an event like this,” Williams said. “But as it got closer and closer, it became clear it was going to be hard to plan things. They made progress, but not enough to pull it off this semester.”
The funds the senate allocated will remain tied to the concert, but since the current fiscal year ends July 1, the money will be rolled into the next fiscal year in order to pay for the concert in the fall.
Williams said there was initially some frustration in the Student Senate about the plans for the concert being pushed back. “$27,000 is a lot of money,” he said. “But I think there’s less frustration now because the plans are still going forward.”
The committee planning the event is made up of Welter and 18 students who have taken on various roles in organization. One student on the committee, Delaney Kenny, was in charge of planning the organizing timeline and assigning other students to planning subcommittees. Kenny, a freshman business major, said putting the concert off until the fall will allow for a better-planned event.
“I’m sad that we didn’t have enough time to do it, but there’s always next year,” she said.
The committee has not yet chosen an artist, but Welter said they have settled on a genre — rock/alternative — by polling students on Facebook through the Gorham Events Board page. Originally seeking to poll 150 students, Welter said over 200 students responded and overwhelmingly voted for a rock/alternative act. Welter said an artist should be chosen by July.
Welter and some of the students on the committee will be working over the summer to nail down the plans for the concert.