May 30—It’s not unusual for long-running balloon festivals to crash, deflated by shortages of volunteers and cash.

The Dansville Festival of Balloons in Livingston County, New York, for instance, grounded its 41-year-old event in 2023 because of a “continued decline of volunteer staffing” and a difficult financial situation.

Like the Great Falls Balloon Festival in Lewiston and Auburn, the New York festival was run by a group of dedicated volunteers who put long hours into organizing a three-day annual event that drew as many as 20,000 spectators.

A decade-old hot air balloon festival in Lisle, Illinois, called Eyes to the Skies went under in 2021 after a second straight year of failing to take to the air.

Its organizers said on social media they were disbanding “due to a lack of interest and support from community members and a decreasing number of available volunteers who are able to meet the time commitment of running the 3-4-day event.”

The Freedom Balloon Festival in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, also got socked during the pandemic in 2020 and never took to the air again.

But long before the pandemic, even long-running, well-established balloon festivals struggled to take flight.

After over a quarter of century, the Balloons Over Bristol festival in Connecticut collapsed over several years until it ended in 2005.

The Bristol Jaycees operated the festival for 26 years before shutting it down after a move to some nearby fairgrounds proved a bust.

A range of issues arose, from insurance to the loss of the field originally used in Bristol, but organizers said they also faced a serious shortage of volunteers and people willing to do the extensive legwork to put it all together.

“They have a very serious labor shortage,” former City Councilor Joe Wilson said at the time.

Similar woes grounded the Park City Balloon Festival in 1994 in Utah.

Its director told The Salt Lake Tribune that the decade-old festival was “delightful but expensive.”

Joan Calder, the director, told the paper that securing corporate sponsors was getting harder as the costs rose each year. She also said that chamber of commerce officials were no longer convinced that the economic benefits of the event outweighed its expense.

Gwinnett, Georgia, saw the same trend back in 1996 when it pulled the plug on one of the biggest balloon festivals in the country.

Its organizers told The Atlanta Constitution they simply couldn’t find enough volunteers or sponsors to keep it afloat.

The Brandon Balloon Festival in Florida died in the 1990s after many years when it ran short on volunteers and couldn’t find enough sponsors to make it financially worthwhile.

The Great Bloomsbury Balloon Race, a New Jersey festival that drew thousands to Hunterdon County in the 1980s, shut down in 1988 after a successful decade when it ran out of volunteers.

But organizers there also said they had also grown weary of complaints from farmers about balloons landing on their crops.

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