Despite dealing with floods and wildfires, the City of Merritt is ready for this years edition of Rockin’ River Fest.

The City of Merritt’s Economic Recovery Advisor, Stephanie Moore, said on the NL Morning News, that they’ve been working on getting the city back to normal and thinks people will be impressed with what they see.

“We’re doing some improvements to our city centre this spring and our businesses are certainly ready to welcome back visitors and if people haven’t been to Merritt in the past two years, they’ll see some changes, some things that are new. So, we’re ready to welcome people back,” she said.

Moore says the four day festival will be like it was pre-pandemic with the option of staying at the site itself.

“Definitely the event organizers do play a huge part in making sure that people are accommodated in some way or another and they have a great time and I understand that camping will still be available on their site because of course, they were hit by the events of the November Coldwater flood.”

Moore says the even will bring a much needed boost to the local economy, agreeing that the festival is the city’s marquee event.

“This is probably our biggest one. We do have a couple other festivals coming to town this summer and another one that’s considering us for the fall so, I think the popularity of the Rockin’ River Festival has probably caused that spin off to attract more festivals to the festival grounds.”

“The festival organizers did an economic assessment in 2018 and it showed that there’s over 8,000 visitors that actually stayed for the four nights in the area so that’s a huge boon to the economy and the economic spin offs are in the millions of dollars.”

Moore says if people don’t want to camp there’s plenty of hotel space but she says you should book well in advance or you might be disappointed.

Rockin River Fest goes July 28 – 31 and tickets go on sale Thursday.