Big Crop of Strawberry Festival-Goers Expected

Ten years ago, Oxnard city leaders and strawberry enthusiasts decided to stage a festival at the Channel Islands Harbor celebrating the juicy red fruit that is Ventura County’s second largest cash crop.

About 25,000 people attended the two-day event when it debuted in 1984, and in the years since the California Strawberry Festival has mushroomed into one of Ventura County’s biggest special events.

This year, organizers expect more than 70,000 people to crowd College Park in Oxnard for the two-day festival, which begins Saturday at 10 a.m. and will feature live entertainment, arts and crafts, pie-eating contests, a 10K race and strawberries prepared in every conceivable way.

Three Dog Night, the Temptations, Big Mountain and Doug Kershaw will headline the weekend’s musical performances, while clowns, puppets and face-painting will entertain children throughout the weekend in the festival’s Strawberryland.

Forecasters expect scattered storm clouds that have hovered over Ventura County for days to clear this weekend, revealing sunny skies and warmer temperatures.

“We’ve really tried to focus on a family event,” said festival committee member Don DeArmond, who was one of the event’s original planners. “We’ve tried to (create) something that the city of Oxnard could be proud of.”

This week the Oxnard City Council agreed to turn over the festival’s management to a private, nonprofit corporation next year. City leaders want to spin off the event so as to reduce the city’s liability and make the festival self-sufficient.

In each of the past five years, the festival has generated more than $500,000 in profit, with much of it directed to support local nonprofit groups.

DeArmond said the privatization will help ease the festival’s budget process and attract long-term sponsors.

“The main reason we needed to do that was for years we’ve been budgeted on a yearly basis,” he said. “Our problem was now that we’ve grown, our sponsors want to talk to us about two-year and three-year deals and we couldn’t do that because we had to come up to the yearly budget.”

DeArmond said the decision to privatize won’t affect the character of the festival, which prides itself on its family oriented events and low cost.

“We want to refine it, improve it and bring in better entertainment and arts and crafts. We don’t want to turn it into a commercial monster,” he said.

Tickets for the festival are $5 for adults, $3 for senior citizens and children ages 2 to 12, and children under 2 are admitted for free. The ticket cost includes admission to the featured concerts.

The Strawberry Festival’s growing popularity has overwhelmed officials at the Oxnard Chamber of Commerce and the city’s special events office, who have been deluged by phone calls in the weeks leading up to the event.

“In February, I was getting 20 calls a day just on the festival,” said chamber employee Peggy Hollinger. “Now, we’re getting up to 50 and 60 calls a day, and we’re not the ones who handle the festival.”

The city’s special events office, which is handling the event, has resorted to a recorded message to field the calls.

“Every year it just grows and gets bigger and better,” Hollinger said. “We are overwhelmed.”