We hope you enjoyed this weekend’s “Old Fashioned, Patriotic, Fourth of July Celebration,” which included a parade, boat parade, ceremony to honor World War II veterans, Hall of Fame induction, DJ’s, live music by seven bands and an incredible fireworks show.
There are so many people to thank and congratulate for this weekend’s excellent Independence Day celebration:
A special congratulation goes to Jesse Williams and Precision Fireworks, who coordinated with the Carlsbad Fire Department to put on a fireworks show that everyone is saying is the best they’ve seen. We had visitors from much larger cities in town over the weekend tell us that they plan to keep coming back to Carlsbad because the show was so great.
Thank you to our parks and recreation department and other members of public works, who got going on cleanup Monday morning and did an excellent job. These men and women had already been busy throughout the week due to the weather. So many of our city teams went above and beyond for this weekend, especially our police and fire departments, the Riverwalk Recreation Center (who is responsible for all of the beautiful decorations around town), stage manager Lupe Ornelas and everyone with facility maintenance. Our museum staff did a great job with the Hall of Fame ceremony the SENM Historical Society.
Thank you also to our community partner agencies for all of their hard work, including Eddy County, the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce, MainStreet and Pearl of the Pecos. It was great to have a boat parade back in Carlsbad for the first time in many years.
Local community sponsors – both individuals and industries, made our fireworks and concert series possible. Our event sponsors included AR Foreman and R360 as Title Sponsors. Our gold sponsors were Capitan Energy, TCS, Bobcat, XTO, Chevron, Oxy, Devon, ConocoPhllips and Solaris. Silver Sponsors were Nuclear Waste Partnership, Crestwood, Murrill Electric, Brandon Chandler, Carlsbad Medical Center, Double Eagle Pipeline and Intrepid. Our In-Kind sponsors were the Fiddler’s Inn, the Fairfield Inn, Fuson Property Rental Rentals and Tate Branch.
Thank you to all of them and, of course, to all of our incredible performers. Carlsbad native and songwriter Sonny Throckmorton joined us for our sponsor dinner and was a hit as always. Groupo Veneno and the Southwest Surfers rounded out a wonderful weekend of music. Red Rocket did a great job broadcasting many of our events.
Most importantly, we want to give a very special thank you to the volunteers who played the biggest role of all. Our event chairman, Danny Fletcher, worked a full weekend Friday, Saturday and Sunday to make everything happen. Ken Britt, Joe Epstein, David Prell, Voncile King, Bill Brooks, Gabe Rubio, Steve Angel, Joy Springer and the CARS Club and the Veterans Honor Guard were among the many, many volunteers who helped put together the weekend’s events. Special thanks to former Governor Susana Martinez for visiting and helping us with our events.
We only had a few setbacks: Saturday’s weather didn’t quite cooperate, so we will work with award-nominated Stranded and put together another great event featuring them later this summer.
On another note, congratulations again to Trevor Rogers for being selected as an All-Star pitcher during his rookie year. On June 23, Rogers became the first Marlins rookie to strike out 100 or more batters in their first 15 starts of a season, and the first left-handed rookie to do so for any team since 2011. This is another of so many great accomplishments for Trevor this year.
Sincerely,
Carlsbad Mayor Dale Janway