Simi Valley Days Again Searching for a Home

With time running short, the organizers of Simi Valley Days are seeking a new site for the western-themed event’s carnival held every September.

At a meeting tonight, organizers will beseech business and property owners in the city’s business district to host the carnival on Tapo Street. A delay in grading work leaves the event’s planned location on 1st Street unusable.

“We still have quite a few options,” said Simi Valley Days Carnival Chairman Wes Miller. “We will hold the carnival, we’re pretty sure.”

But the carnival, scheduled for Sept. 17-21, will probably be held in a smaller venue.

The unusable site--a hilly, undeveloped lot at the northeast corner of 1st Street and the 118 Freeway--offered 10 acres for the carnival and rodeo, plus 22 acres of parking. The proposed Tapo Street location has only six acres, just enough for the carnival. Unable to lasso a big vacant lot in time, organizers have already scrapped the annual rodeo, one of Simi Valley Days’ more popular offerings.

So organizers are pinning their hopes on the aging business district.

“The only problem with Tapo Street might be that we’d have to run some shuttle service for parking,” Miller said, suggesting Simi Valley High or the Metrolink station as possible parking lots. “But there’s enough room to put a carnival on there. There’s more acreage there than you would think.”

Obstacles aside, planners of Simi Valley Days--which is a fund-raising vehicle for community clubs and service groups--say the show will go on.

“As of this moment, we don’t have a site, and it’s two months away. And we are concerned,” said Simi Valley Days Executive Director Jo Ann Macek, who will approach the committee charged with revitalizing Tapo Street and ask it to provide a suitable locale for the festival’s KowChip Bingo, merry-go-rounds and vending booths. “We’ll breathe a lot easier knowing that we have a site.”

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At tonight’s meeting, event organizers will propose that the carnival be held at a six-acre site where the Sears and Pic ‘N’ Save once stood. Another possibility is to block off Tapo Street to cars to give the event more elbow room.

That option would keep the carnival afloat this year and attract customers to the business district, which is attempting a comeback, said Councilwoman Barbara Williamson.

“I think [organizers] are between a rock and a hard place,” she said. “Hopefully we can soften the blow. . . . This will certainly not be the end of Simi Valley Days.”

Councilwoman Sandi Webb has a few doubts about whether the celebration will find a home in time to meet its mid-September schedule.

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“Hopefully we’ll be able to have the carnival,” she said. “But we may wind up missing a year. It’s sad, but the world would not come to an end.”

Event organizers have been forced to play a game of location musical chairs this year.

The event’s longtime home, at the southeast corner of Los Angeles Avenue and Madera Road, is being developed into homes and cannot be used. So organizers leased a city-owned site off 1st Street as a home for the next decade, so long as a regional mall didn’t come through in the interim.

Problem is, that site has to be graded to be serviceable for the carnival.

The Operating Engineers Training Trust agreed earlier this year to grade the site for free, as practice for heavy-equipment operators. But the trust’s current grading project in Thousand Oaks is behind schedule, so the new site will not be ready by Sept. 17.