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LULING — The Rotary Club of St. Charles Parish and the Alligator Festival Committee announced this week the 2020 Alligator Festival has been canceled. The steady increase of the COVID-19 cases in the River Parishes led the Alligator Festival Committee and the Rotary Club Board to make the  decision stating that it would be counter to core values of Rotary to hold a festival if it might put the community at risk.

   “We thought of all the possible ways that we could safely hold the festival, while still maintaining the high quality of entertainment that our community deserves,” said Rotary Club of St. Charles Parish President Carrie Thomas. “In the end, with the needed safety measures, the same quality festival would not have been possible.”

“The main purpose of our festival is fundraising for our Rotary Scholarship Program,” said Scholarship Foundation Secretary Fen Swann. “We felt that holding a festival to raise funds, while so many in our community are out of work, would be improper.”

“Decades of support from our community and 40 years of festival success have meant that the Scholarship Program will survive even without an Alligator Festival this year,” said Alligator Committee Chairman Eric Dishongh. “On behalf of the Festival Committee, and the Rotary Club of St. Charles Parish, we’d like to thank the St. Charles Parish community for its years of continuing support, and invite everyone to come out next year to our 2021 Alligator Festival September 23 -26, 2021.”

  For more information about the Alligator Festival and Rotary Club of St. Charles Parish, please visit www.AlligatorFestival.org. The Alligator Festival, hosted by the Rotary Club of St. Charles Parish, is held annually during the last full weekend of September at the Westbank Bridge Park in Luling, Louisiana to raise funds for the St. Charles Rotary Club Scholarship Foundation.