Dragon boat festival move becomes a necessity

While looking for a new location for the Montana Dragon Boat Festival, the Kalispell Convention and Visitor Bureau may have missed its chance to hold the festival at its previous venue. 

The Flathead Lake Lodge in Bigfork has hosted the Dragon Boat Festival for all three years, including during the second weekend in September for the past two years. However, the Kalispell Convention and Visitor Bureau decided to look into moving the two-day festival to Lakeside this year to cut down on parking fees and venue costs, according to Diane Medler, director of the visitors bureau. 

Now, Flathead Lake Lodge is booked for the weekend the Dragon Boat Festival is scheduled to take place, making the move to Lakeside more of a necessity than a choice.  

“We gave them until December 15 to decide if they wanted to hold it here, and we’re well past that,” said Doug Averill, owner of the Flathead Lake Lodge. The lodge now is booked to host a convention during the second weekend of September. 

Averill said the lodge charged the visitor bureau a “minimal use fee” in an effort to support the community project, but the largest cost came from parking. Because not all of the thousands of spectators and racers could comfortably park at the lodge, the bureau rented an area off Montana 35 for parking and visitors were shuttled to the lodge for the festival. The fee for the lot and shuttle buses came to “well over $20,000” Averill said. 

“[Flathead Lake Lodge] would do whatever we could to make it work for [the Dragon Boat Festival],” he said. “We’d bend over backward if we needed to.” 

The visitor bureau is currently considering Volunteer Park in Lakeside as the venue for this year’s Dragon Boat Festival. However, the visitor bureau has yet to turn in the necessary paperwork for an administrative conditional-use permit to the Flathead County Planning and Zoning Office.  

“We have no reason to think that it won’t be approved,” Medler said. 

The bureau is waiting on a final signature from a landowner near Volunteer Park who gave a verbal agreement that his property could be used as additional parking for the festival. 

The visitor bureau plans to use three land parcels near Volunteer Park as parking lots, and has signatures from the other two landowners already, according to Medler. The bureau hopes to obtain the third signature soon and meet with the county planning office next week to turn in the permit. 

Parking sites include Lakeside School, the Lakeside QRU building on Bills Road and land owned by the Montana Department of Transportation. 

Once the permit application is completed and filed, Flathead County Planning and Zoning will take about a month to review the application. The county also will send notifications to residents and property owners within 150 feet of the proposed event venue. 

Medler chose not to comment on whether the bureau has a backup plan for the festival, or if the current dates for the festival could be changed if the permit is not approved.