An effort to have the Tall Ships festivities make Tacoma a port of call in 2017 is getting formalized now that organizers have formal support from city officials to develop a plan, a budget and a roster of assorted who-does-what-by-when items that will include city dollars.
Tacoma Waterfront Association founder Stan Selden has formed an ad-hoc committee to explore the possibility of bringing Tall Ships in 2017. The group includes members of the Tacoma City Council, Port of Tacoma, Pierce County, Metro Parks Tacoma, Travel Tacoma, Foss Waterway Seaport and Foss Waterway Development Authority.
The city hosted a stop on the race that involves historic, wooden-hulled ships from around the world in 2005 and 2008. Both events drew more than 200,000 visitors to Tacoma’s downtown and landed the city with Port of the Year honors both times.
But both events ran over budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars, which only recently were settled. The economic downturn killed off plans for repeat events in 2011 and 2014. The economy has since recovered. The city has new attractions to promote, and a new Tall Ships planner in the works would again put Tacoma on the international stage on the same scale as the upcoming golf tournament next summer.
“This is as big as the U.S. Open,” Selden said.
The Tacoma group is sending out calls for an event planner to handle the logistics of the event, but already have a candidate in mind. Craig Samborski, owner of Draw Events, has already served as the planner for a half dozen Tall Ship events for various other cities and is already working on plans at his own expense to land the event for Tacoma before formally being awarded the contract. That will come in December.
The New Year will bring projected budgets as well as a sailing schedule for the five-day event that would happen in July or August 2017, if the city is slated as a stop by Tall Ships America organizers.
The working plan is that participating ships would rendezvous in San Diego and race northward with stops in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Coos Bay, Ore., Tacoma and Willapa Bay before heading to British Columbia.
Starting the local planning now allows other arts efforts to possibly tie into the Tall Ships theme with Tacoma Opera and Tacoma Symphony, for example, possibly staging nautical performances that year or maybe the Grand Cinema screening sailing-related films, Councilmember David Boe said. He noted that he attended the 2005 and 2008 events and found that they didn’t fully engage the greater arts community.
“I think we can have higher expectations,” he said.
The City Council endorsed plans to continue discussions about what city services, tax dollars or in-kind sponsorships the effort would need. Details for police security, garbage collection, program printing, marketing and staff support will all come in the months ahead. But the direction is clear.
City officials want the event to happen.
“As a city, we are trying to brand ourselves as an international waterfront city,” Mayor Marilyn Strickland said. “So this is completely consistent with the idea of what we want to be as a city.”