Photo by jessebean

After losing the annual Caribbean Carnival to Baltimore, you’d think D.C. would want to be careful about how it approaches long-standing street festivals. But now it seems that D.C. officials and organizers of the city’s largest Latino festival are feuding over where to hold the annual Fiesta D.C. street festival.

According to the Post and an online petition, D.C. officials are hoping to move the long-running Fiesta D.C. festival to Pennsylvania Avenue, taking it away from the heart of the city’s Latino community in Mt. Pleasant and Columbia Heights.

City officials justify the proposed move by saying that the annual festival has grown too large for Mt. Pleasant. Last year, community activists complained that organizers and D.C. didn’t do enough to limit car traffic through the neighborhood or prepare for the necessary post-festival cleanup; Mt. Pleasant ANC Commissioner Jack McKay wrote in an online posting yesterday that he could not support the festival again unless its organizers promised to address problems that came up last year.

Fiesta D.C. organizers have considered moving the festival to 14th Street north of Columbia Heights, but city officials worry that it would require shutting down a busy fire station at 14th and Newton Streets NW. (In 2009, a proposed move to 14th Street was shot down for that very reason.)

Pennsylvania Avenue is often used for large-scale events; before the Caribbean Carnival decamped for Baltimore, city officials tried to convince organizers to move it there also. This wouldn’t be the first time that the annual Latino festival was moved, either—in the early- and mid-1990s, it took place on the grounds of the Washington Monument and along Pennsylvania Avenue.

Opponents of the plan worry that moving Fiesta D.C. would be yet one more case in which D.C. is becoming less friendly to neighborhood celebrations and street festivals.