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2017 Riverfest Attendance Down From Last Year, Says Organizer

Hugo Phan
/
KMUW/File photo

The Wichita Riverfest wrapped up on Saturday. Here, a look at how the event fared in its 46th year.

Attendance at the 2017 Riverfest was down slightly from last year: 410,000 compared to 455,000.

Mary Beth Jarvis, president and CEO of Wichita Festivals Inc., says a rainy first weekend impacted turnout, but things picked up by the end of the 9-day event.

“Frankly, folks came out even in that first weekend, but certainly throughout the week," she says.

Total button sales won’t be available for a few more weeks, but Jarvis says early-bird and gate sales were about 37,000.

This year’s music lineup featured several big-name acts, such as Common and the Flaming Lips, but Jarvis says Riverfest will always focus on being a hometown festival.

“We really want a nice blend of festival events that are community-unique, and then we want to have great concerts, so we want to start working on that immediately," she says.

Approximately 7500 volunteers helped out at the festival; Jarvis says they began cleanup Sunday.

Though attendance was down this year, arrests were up, says the Wichita Police Department: There were 10 arrests, which Sgt. Nikki Woodrow said is more than there were last year. However, as recently as 2012 there were more than 100 law-enforcement issues tied to the event. Woodrow called this year's event a "very successful Riverfest."

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Nadya Faulx is KMUW's Digital News Editor and Reporter, which means she splits her time between working on-air and working online, managing news on KMUW.org, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. She joined KMUW in 2015 after working for a newspaper in western North Dakota. Before that she was a diversity intern at NPR in Washington, D.C.