The Cedar Polka Fest could be in jeopardy once again, due to ongoing friction between the popular summer festival and the township where it takes place.

According to Lisa Rossi-Brett, executive director of the Cedar Polka Fest Foundation, the organization has held off on any major planning for the 2025 festival in hopes that the Solon Township Board would nail down a fee structure for events seeking to use its public parks. That issue, which sprung up last spring in the leadup to the 2024 Polka Fest, was supposed to be resolved sometime this fall. No such discussions ever took place, and Rossi-Brett says the Polka Fest can’t wait any longer for a decision.

“Our new township supervisor, Chris Comeaux, has his first meeting this Thursday, December 5, so we reached out to Chris and to Township Clerk Shirley Mikowski and asked that the property use agreement [for the Polka Fest to use Solon Township parks] be put on the agenda,” Rossi-Brett says. “We still don’t know what’s going to happen at the December 5 meeting, but honestly, if we don’t get an approved lease agreement at this meeting, we will have to call the Polka Fest at that point, because we’re already in a position where we’ve got to do 12 months’ worth of planning to do in nine months’ time.”

Historically, the Polka Fest has paid just $1 each year to formalize an agreement with Solon Township for the use of the Cedar Community Park. Rossi-Brett argues the deal makes sense for all parties, as much of the proceeds from the Polka Fest go toward Solon Township and its parks, or toward community events like last week’s Light Up Cedar. In May, though, Kelly Claar and Mary Taylor – then the volunteer co-chairs of Solon Township’s parks and recreation committee – urged board members to require new deposits, fees, and inspections before agreeing to lease township parkland to the Polka Fest Foundation.

Rossi-Brett told the Leelanau Ticker in June that she wasn’t opposed to paying fees, but criticized township officials for the last-minute nature of the conversation. She also argued that the fees being discussed – “We’ve heard numbers all the way from $5,000 to $20,000,” she said – were arbitrary and needed to be based on township expenses and applied equally to all events that use Solon Township parks. Rossi-Brett vowed to cancel the 2024 Polka Fest if the fee proved to be too expensive, noting “There's only a certain amount that we can absorb as an organization.”

A cancellation ultimately wasn’t necessary: The township board voted at a June 28 special meeting not to increase the Polka Fest’s fee for 2024, leasing Cedar Community Park to the Foundation for the traditional $1. According to meeting minutes from that night, though, the $1 lease was only approved “with the stipulation that a lease fee for the 2025 Cedar Polka Festival will be agreed upon in early fall of 2024 between Solon Township and the [Polka Fest Foundation].”

Since then, the Polka Fest Foundation has been holding off on booking food providers, musical performers, or other vendors for the 2025 festival, waiting to find out whether it can afford Solon Township’s fees.

“Once bitten, twice shy,” Rossi-Brett says. “This year, we've not booked anything. We've not signed a single contract. When the township hit us with this fee discussion for 2024, we had about $30,000 in deposits that were non-refundable hanging out there that we could have potentially lost if they hadn't approved the lease agreement. This year, we're sitting on our hands, because we know the only responsible thing to do is to make sure we have a lease agreement in place before we start spending money.”

But things are getting down to the wire. Despite the board’s pledge to revisit the fee conversation in “early fall,” Rossi-Brett feels the body has “kicked the issue down the road to let the new board deal with it.” That board has saw majority turnover during election season, with only Mikowski and Township Secretary Joan Gauthier keeping their seats. Comeaux ousted former Township Supervisor James Lautner in the August primary, and two other newcomers – Steve Morgan and the aforementioned Claar – won board seats in November.

Former Solon Township board member Steve Yoder confirms Rossi-Brett’s suspicion that the board has procrastinated on revisiting the Polka Fest discussion. The matter, he says, was on the agenda for the board’s regular October and November meetings, but “kept getting pushed back” because of the impending turnover. (Yoder didn’t seek re-election to the Solon Township Board because he ran for – and won – a seat on the Leelanau County Board of Commissioners.)

“I think a few of the people on the board didn’t want to be caught in the mess again, so they just kicked it down the road to let the new board and new administration deal with,” Yoder says of the Polka Fest situation. “And as a result, things have gotten pushed back to the last minute again.”

Asked whether the board has discussed creating a universal fee policy that would apply to anyone leasing a township park, Yoder says that “not a word” has been said on the topic since June.

Reached Monday morning, Comeaux confirmed that the Polka Fest lease agreement will be on the agenda for Thursday’s meeting, but couldn’t answer whether the board had a dollar amount in mind for lease fees.

“I can’t comment on that yet, because this is going to be my first meeting and I’m just walking into this whole thing,” Comeaux says. “Right now, there's no official comment from the board other than that it’s on the agenda.”