Playing Jenga with the fireworks

It’s not really about the fireworks.
It’s not really about splitting the biggest summer event between the two towns.
It’s about not removing another Jenga stick from a somewhat wobbly tower.

Since Ronald Reagan was President, the towns of Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte have bickered over where to launch the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Of course the two towns have differing philosophies and bickering is not unusual. Call it part of the charm.
In an effort to be neighborly, the Crested Butte town council last year at this time agreed to a request by Mt. Crested Butte to launch the fireworks display from Warming House Hill. It followed a concert at the base area and worked out fine. It was the first time in a decade the mountain had hosted the display and it certainly brought people up the hill.
But in their discussions last spring, the Crested Butte council members, Mt. Crested Butte Mayor William Buck and Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Richard Bond all sort of agreed to either find a mutually agreeable site that would provide visibility of the pyrotechnics from both communities or, in an attempt at fairness, shift the launch site between the towns every other year. There was nothing written down, no contracts signed, but that was the general tenor of the conversations. It was a neighborly nod, the proverbial handshake agreement.
One of the other outcomes from those discussions was that a benefits analysis of holding the fireworks on the mountain could be made quickly and decisions concerning the Fourth of July in 2010 could be wrapped up by the fall. That did not happen. It is now the spring and the bickering is just beginning again.
Mayor Buck told Crested Butte Mayor Leah Williams this week that his council wants to keep the fireworks on the hill. Bond is an advocate of sharing the Fourth of July wealth between the two towns with daytime activities being centered in Crested Butte and evening festivities being held in Mt. Crested Butte.
There is probably some sense in the argument that the town of Crested Butte gets the parade, the games and an afternoon patriotic concert at the Center for the Arts while evening festivities shift up the mountain. BUT that wasn’t the understanding. When two “friends” shake hands, even tacitly, a deal is struck. And sometimes it works out better than others. But when building trust, both parties have to stick to the deal…don’t they? If this conversation was really taking place in the fall, there might be time to make a persuasive case. There still might be time to do that. But July is closer than you think and there doesn’t appear to be much effort to sit down and genuinely work things out.

Backing away from a deal, no matter the logic of doing so, breaks a trust and everything from then on probably needs lawyers and contracts, extra eyes and stuff we like to think we left in the real world.
It just seems the understanding between these two friends was to find an ideal site or give it to Crested Butte this year. To do otherwise is just shaking up the habitually shaky (but charming) relationship between the two towns.
Is pulling out another wooden stick from the leaning Jenga tower really a good idea?
It’s really not in this case. Everyone involved should work to find an amicable way to work this thing out…or bite their tongues this year and put on a great fireworks show in Crested Butte in a couple of months.