City leaders are considering whether Corbin’s annual NIBROC Festival should move off of Main Street and be reconfigured in a way that allows the main thoroughfare to remain open to traffic.
Corbin City Manager Mike Phillips said this week that preliminary discussion has taken place regarding the change.
"It is a thought," Phillips said. "One of the issues is that US 25, Main Street, carries 20,000 cars a day. When we block it up for multiple hours at a time, it blocks up all that traffic. That’s our inbound traffic. Those are our tourists that we want to be able to find where they are going when they get into town."
Also a consideration are the downtowna merchants, some of whom, Phillips said, complain that NIBROC has a negative impact on their business.
The Festival is a four-day event that takes place in mid-August. It features all sorts of activities, sports tournaments, musical entertainment on a main stage, a parade and a large carnival, among other things. Typically, vendors take up Main Street from Gordon all the way to Fourth Street.
Before 2004, NIBROC was contained to Depot Street. But the 52nd Annual NIBROC Festival that year brought big changes and Main Street was closed as well to accommodate vendors who had become more interested in the event. Musical entertainment and the carnival also became larger parts of the festival that year.
Bruce Carpenter, Executive Director of the Southern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, and the principal organizer of the event, said Tuesday that he has spoken with Phillips about the changes and is open to any suggestions. NIBROC is sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce.
"I have always said, it doesn’t matter to me where NIBROC is held or how it is held, but it needs to be all together in one place," Carpenter said. "As it is right now, there’s no way we could put it all on Depot Street and keep it the same size we have it."
One tentative proposal would be to put vendors on side streets that connect Main Street to Depot Street and Kentucky Ave.
Phillips said if some of those areas could be utilized, then Main Street could stay open for traffic and alleviate some of the merchants’ concerns. Also, he said plans are underway to make Depot Street more appealing with trees, fencing and other things.
"I know they use NIBROC Park quite a bit and I don’t want to cut them out of that," Phillips said. "My honest opinion though is that I think it would be a little easier if we could move most of NIBROC."
Regardless, both Phillips and Carpenter said it is unlikely any changes will be made to this year’s 60th Annual NIBROC Festival.
"It’s something we are going to have to look at and talk a lot about," Carpenter said.
