By BECKY KISER
Hays Post
Assistant Hays Police Chief Brian Dawson knows homecoming weekends are busy and always draw lots of visitors to town.
This weekend, particularly Friday, will likely be even more hectic.
“The forecast is for good weather, and we have Hays High School homecoming, Oktoberfest and Fort Hays State University homecoming all this weekend,” Dawson pointed out.
“That’s OK for us. We gear up for one big weekend this way as opposed to spreading it out for three weekends as we normally do. We’re already gearing up for Friday’s Oktoberfest, and we’ll put the Hays High parade and football game in there. It’s just humming along,” Dawson said. Fort Hays State University’s homecoming parade is Saturday morning.
There will be more law enforcement in town, according to Dawson.
“KHP (Kansas Highway Patrol) brings in more officers for (DUI) saturation patrols we’ll have Friday and Saturday nights. Their primary focus will be looking for impaired drivers and help keep the roadway safe. It makes sense for (the HPD) to target this weekend for a saturation patrol. We try to do several throughout a year and get a little bit of grant money to do that. In addition, we’ll have our checklanes.”
Dawson wants the community, and especially visitors, to know there are taxi services and Safe Ride for people who’ve had too much to drink.
“There might be a little longer wait this weekend for Safe Ride, but they’re going to be out there working hard giving as many rides as they can.” Safe Ride is a free service and will operate extended hours later this week.
HPD officers will be blocking parking spaces Friday afternoon in downtown Hays along the HHS parade route on Main Street.
The parade starts at 5 p.m. with entry lineup an hour earlier. Oktoberfest will be underway until 7 p.m. in Municipal Park at the very end of south Main Street.
Those two popular and well-attended events happening at the same time is a first in Hays and will mean a slight change in HPD safety preparations.
“Traditionally, we’ll allow the parade to go all the way down south Main, and they’ll disembark off the floats in the 200 or 300 block. Some of the floats will continue on over to the ball park at Lewis Field,” he said. “With Oktoberfest going on at the same time, there’s going to be a lot of foot traffic, there’s going to be a lot of vehicle traffic on Main Street that wouldn’t be able to get cleared off. We wouldn’t want anybody to be tempted to interfere with the parade or anybody to jump off a float and go over to the Oktoberfest grounds, so we’re going to kind of distance those a little bit.
“We’re going to put a barricade up on Main Street just south of Sixth Street. Floats that want to go west off the parade route at the end will disembark at Seventh Street. They can head west either to Lewis Field Stadium or they can go back up to the beginning of the parade route (at 16th Street.) Those that want to go east can go east on Sixth Street.”
Dawson said utilizing the wide one-way streets of Seventh and Sixth will make it easier for floats to turn off the parade route.
“I also think it will keep people from coming up north from the Oktoberfest and getting into the parade route and the parade route from getting down there. That could have really bottle-necked into a congested problem,” Dawson said. “Instead of trying to work through that congestion, we think this is a better deal.”
With the Hays High homecoming parade ending earlier on the Main Street route, parade watchers are advised to gather north of Seventh Street.