Colten Williams began putting together his Christmas light show a decade ago at the behest of his grandmother, who was inspired by light shows she had seen on TV.
But trouble started brewing in Kingsville after several neighbours lodged complaints about their street being crowded with cars for six weeks every year.
This month, the city enacted a new bylaw that would force the Williams family to apply for a permit for their display while also placing restrictions on the number of hours they would be allowed to leave the lights on.
“They basically limited the amount of hours I could have my show from about 28 hours a week down to 10 hours a week,” Williams said. “So you have 500 hours, 600 hours worth of set up time just to have 40 hours the lights on all month long. That’s an insane amount of work.”
Rogers said the council is sad to see them turn off the lights but said the show had outgrown its location as well.
“We were saddened to learn that the Williams family will not move forward with their light display this year,” he said.
“Our discussions with the family last year at a council meeting we both agreed that they had outgrown the neighbourhood.”
Rogers went on to say that the city had tried to work with the family to find an alternative location but was unable to meet their demands.
My home town used to put lights all over their waterfront, with cool moving light shows and stuff, it was something i really enjoyed as a kid and got us out and walking by the water in winter. I haven’t seen them do it to the same scale as when i was a kid for many years. It used to be dozens of displays, now there are just a few trees that get lights. I wonder if people not wanting to leave their cars influenced it. Soon the santa parade will be stationary and we can all just drive past it at this rate.
I think it really just came down to costs and city budgets. Cities always seem to cut public funding allocated for things like this when trying to balance their budgets.
That is why I find a few of the comments that were suggesting the city should hire the man a little counterintuitive. The first thing the city would cut would be the light show saying it’s to expensive and to extravagant, probably in the same year they hire him even.