(File Photo of the Beaver County Courthouse)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Beaver, PA) Beaver County Recreation and Tourism Director Tony Caltury responded to an audience member during the audience participation segment of the Beaver County Commissioners’ work session this morning at the Beaver County Courthouse regarding the status of this year’s Beaver County Maple Syrup and Music Festival. Becky Gallagher of Baden asked the Commissioners for an update on that event, because she told them at their work session last week that there were rumors that it was being canceled. After Commissioner Jack Manning addressed Caltury if he had a response to Gallagher’s question, he said: “PUSH Beaver County and the organizers of the event; I haven’t seen an official public statement or press release, but this year’s event is being cancelled due to some structure and leadership of the event. It’s a very, very big loss for us, but I think PUSH is committed to reimagining the event and making it a continuous one, but they felt at this time that it was not doable to do an event in this short time frame from when they were notified about the leadership change to put on an event that’s worthy of a historical event that’s happened over the last 48 years in the county, so our office is committed to working with PUSH and bring in additional volunteers and organizations to make sure that this is just a one-year hiatus and we’ve already reached out to some organizations that may be interested in partnering as well.” One of the other topics that was discussed during this work session was the improvement of the credit rating of Beaver County because during the Solicitors’ report of the work session, Beaver County Solicitor Garen Fedeles mentioned that rating went from an “A” to an “A+” after receiving a recent update from the S&P global ratings at the beginning of this year. This happened after results came in yesterday because of financial flexibility and improvements that were sustained in budgetary performance.