Local businesses gearing up for National Folk Festival

SALISBURY, Md. – “We won’t know how many people are here until they get here.” They’re on their way, but just how many is still up in the air as Salisbury gets ready to host the National Folk Festival next weekend.

Although, planning for an event of this size is no easy task, especially with this being a first for the city.

“When you look at the scale and the number of people that are predicted to come we’ve never done that before. We’ve never hosted an event in this community that has the potential to have 60 to 70 to 80,000 people in our downtown,” explains Mike Dunn, President/CEO of Greater Salisbury Committee.

Since this is only year one, there’s still a lot of unknowns on how it will go and how many will show up, but that’s not stopping the city and local businesses from gearing up for something that could have $15 to $30 million of direct economic impact.

“Extra unnecessary amounts of a little bit of everything from the people down to flour we have in the back of the shop is just being tripled,” explains Micaiah Motes, Manager at MayaBella’s Pizzeria in downtown Salisbury.

From hotels to restaurants, it’s all hands on deck and most likely a lot of trial and error.

“Taking Third Friday and past New Years celebrations and doubling and tripling up on those if we can accomplish this in a six hour period at any point in time in the past five years of being here as a business then we just need to make sure there are two extra people.”

Dunn adds, “It’s a bit of a guessing game but you know the good news is that the worst case scenario is probably going to be better than the typical Monday through Friday or weekend best case scenario that they’ve had, so that’s a good thing.”

Several hotels are also close to or are already completely booked in Salisbury and many hotels in the surrounding areas are also starting to fill up.