Vendor tents took flight on Friday night of the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival.
An unexpected updraft of wind that was probably 40 to 50 miles per hour struck out of nowhere, recalled Kevin Lechler, the executive director of the Denton Festival Foundation, the nonprofit behind the festival.
“No one was prepared,” Lechler said. “Everyone’s thinking, ‘OK, it’s 120 degrees. It’s not going to rain, so we don’t need to weigh down our tents.’”
Lechler and others helped some vendors hold their tents down while some people just let their tents go. One vendor sat crying because her aluminum trays with cooked and raw food were now upside down on the ground.
Strangers began helping her pick up. They began straightening and fixing tents and getting the shade tops back to the right people. It was the biggest representation of the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival that Lechler said he had ever seen in his 24 years with the festival.
“It was such an outpouring of community,” Lechler said. “Everybody was there. Everybody helped everybody else. Vendor helped vendor. People who were there attending the event were helping. Almost all of my board was out there trying to help people, making sure people were OK. I stood there at one point and I’m like, this is Denton. This is why we do what we do.
“All of these people were not worried that they’re competitors. They’re all vendors, but everybody out here was pitching in to help all of them. And that is what we’re all about.”
Now the Denton Festival Foundation could use that same community spirit to help preserve the free festival’s legacy after a series of unfortunate events led it to move the 36-year-old event from its longtime home at Quakertown Park to the North Texas Fairgrounds.
Some of that support came through donations to the nonprofit foundation.
Other supporters wrote social media posts over the weekend with explanations for why the festival moved out of downtown and why the foundation was doing the best it could with the reality it faced.
“Nobody voted to move [Arts & Jazz Fest] out of downtown. A fee reality did it, which is in part because the city showed through its budget where it placed value,” one supporter, Chez Black, wrote on Facebook. “Quakertown has a mature tree canopy that took half a century to grow. The fairgrounds doesn’t, and we came into this weekend off drought restrictions with the grass burned down to nothing. Anyone who spent Saturday afternoon out there hunting for shade has a legitimate grievance.
“But notice what would actually fix it. Shade structures, misting tents, cooling stations, more water points, more EMS on hand for heat calls. Every one of those is a line item, and line items are exactly what got squeezed out of the festival’s budget.”
On Monday, Lechler said the move from Quakertown Park was due to lost sponsorships from big donors such as Budweiser, the University of North Texas and Wells Fargo, dwindling financial support post-COVID-19 and rising costs that depleted the foundation’s financial reserves.
“We’re not the only ones. I talk to nonprofits all the time. We’re all hurting. Every nonprofit in town is hurting because of the economy,” Lechler told the Denton Record-Chronicle. “When people can’t afford a pound of hamburger, they’re not going to give a hundred dollars to their favorite nonprofit. You can’t blame them.”
Lechler said the foundation could no longer afford Quakertown Park after city leaders decided in early June 2025 — three months before the 2025 festival — to begin charging full rental price for the park. The price was more than $100,000 for seven days, and he said the loss of in-kind services added another $90,000 for security and emergency medical services.
Similar cuts were felt by other local nonprofits and, due to a budget shortfall, that led to a smaller footprint for the festival last October at Quakertown Park.
“They’re going to consider giving us in-kind service [for next year], which is nice, and we’ll take it,” Lechler said. “We don’t hate the city. We love the city, and we appreciate all the support that they do.
“But they made some pretty crummy decisions. Unfortunately, we’re not the only ones [affected]. Other people came through that far worse than we did.”
However, for fiscal year 2025-26, the city was still able to award the Denton Festival Foundation a total of $184,800 — $94,000 in hotel occupancy tax funds, $20,000 cash sponsorship and $70,800 of in-kind services that helped to cover the event in October 2025 and this past weekend, according to a city spokesperson on Monday.
That amount was nearly half of the $352,110 the foundation received in fiscal year 2024-25, which consisted of $135,000 in HOT funds, $20,000 cash sponsorship and $197,110 of in-kind services.
For the upcoming fiscal year, the city has proposed to award $221,000 — $105,950 HOT funds, $39,050 cash sponsorship and $76,000 in-kind.
“We value the Arts & Jazz Festival and the important role it plays in celebrating the arts, music and the unique character of Denton,” Kayla Herrod, the city’s director of marketing and communication, said in a Sept. 14 email. “It’s a foundational part of our community’s cultural identity, and we remain committed to working with its organizers to preserve its important role in our community.”
Contacted Monday, Mayor Chris Watts, who wasn’t serving on the City Council last year, indicated that he has been hearing from constituents and plans to meet with staff and with the festival organizers to see what they can do and how they can move forward.
The North Texas Fairgrounds would have been the perfect location for the festival — if this had been a normal September. Heat advisories were in effect for Saturday and Sunday. It was the only weekend that Lechler said the fairgrounds had the entire facility available.
“We can’t fight 107-degree weather,” Lechler said. “We can’t fight that, so we did the best that we could. We put up shade where we could up the shade. We gave away water. We did everything we could. It was unfortunate, and we’re going to have to take a little bit and regroup and look at where we want to go.”
The foundation also partnered with local manufacturer TetraPak, which donated 80,000 cartons of water to give away.
Lechler said the Dallas-Fort Worth Professional Musicians’ Association also stepped up this year, as the union did last year, with the Music Performance Trust Fund and covered 100% of the fees for all the professional musicians who performed this past weekend “because they know that we’re really struggling.”
Despite the heat, he said the festival had some best-sounding music this year, from the likes of musicians such as Grant Sabin, one of the top slide guitar blues players Lechler said he’s ever seen.
The layout of the fairgrounds lent itself to offering the best sound, unlike Quakertown Park “where there was always a sound bleed” from the other stages, Lechler said.
“There was no bleed,” he said. “The buildings are located in the perfect location, so the professional musicians loved it.”
One of those professional musicians was Cassandra Berry from Lady Cass & the Fellas, a local soul-vibe band, who told the Record-Chronicle over the weekend that she has always loved being part of the festival.
Berry used to play on one of the festival’s community stages but was now playing the professional stage, which she said “was just that much more special.”
“The heat is overwhelming, but we still come to party because we love Denton,” Berry said. “We make that sacrifice. So, if they say we’re gonna be at the fairgrounds, that’s where we’re gonna be, too. Do we want it back at Quakertown? Absolutely. But we’re not going to give up on our community. We’re not gonna give up the tradition of what helps make Denton what it is with regard to our music community.
“So if they tell us, ‘Well, next year is going to be in a parking lot.’ We’ll be there, too.”