Wagga's Gears and Beers festival has been disrupted for the second year in a row, with organisers postponing the event until March next year in response to COVID-19 health advice.
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The Rotary Club of Wollundry Wagga's charity fundraising event, featuring bike rides outside the city and a craft beer festival in the Victory Memorial Gardens, was originally planned for October 2 and 3 this year.
Festival committee chair Phillip McIntosh said the event will now run on March 26 and 27 and the festival still planned to hold an event in October 2022 as well.
"The event brings a huge amount of money to the city and it allows us to donate a huge amount of money to charitable organisations as well but the most important thing right now is the welfare and the safety of everyone: the participants, the volunteers and the community," he said.
"It's incredibly sad that we can't run it for the second year in a row but we are hoping we can run in March; the best advice we could get was that we shouldn't try to plan anything before March so that is what we have endeavoured to do.
"The hope is that we will run in march and then again on the October long weekend in 2022, so we would run two in the same year."
The festival, which usually brings thousands of cyclists and visitors to Wagga, was cancelled last year due to COVID-19 lockdowns.
The festival is setting up a refund system for people who are unable to attend on the new dates but is otherwise rolling over its current bookings to next year.
NSW recorded a new record peak of 466 COVID-19 cases in the 24 hours to 8pm on Friday, leading Premier Gladys Berejiklian to label it the "most concerning day" of the pandemic for the state so far.
Canberra and the ACT is also currently under lockdown and Wagga's local government area has been removed from the Victorian border bubble, effectively banning residents of that state from entering the region.
Mr McIntosh said the social media response to the decision to postpone the event had been "very positive".
"The committee has been meeting quite regularly to review the situation in respect to the fact that we had approaching 3000 rider registrations and the very large majority of registrations came out of Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne," he said.
"It was a very difficult decision to make, there's no two ways about it, but we had to make the decision in the best interests of everyone who supports the event...with case numbers continuing to climb instead of decrease, there was nowhere else for us to go."
Mr McIntosh said the Deni Ute Muster's cancellation also had an impact on the decision to postpose Gears and Beers and the Rotary Club would examine the potential clash with the Wagga Food and Wine Festival on March 28.
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