Best of Bayou coming to Downtown Houma

Plans are being made for a major festival slated for the last weekend of September in downtown Houma. The Best of the bayou festival will occupy Main Street and the surrounding area on Sept. 29 and Sept. 30.

The free-entry festival will feature music, food, arts-and-crafts with a mission to showcase Houma-Terrebonne as a premier tourist destination through, and is a replacement for Downtown on the Bayou, which was an annual event a decade earlier.

Funding for the event was secured as part of its multi-million dollar settlement

Between BP and Louisiana following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Terrebonne Parish received more than $2 million dollars from the Louisiana

Office of Tourism to establish and market several tourism-related projects, which include a branding campaign, way finding signage, along with the revival of a festival. A small portion of that money was designated to seed the festival for 2012 and 2013.

“A signature festival has been long overdue since the loss of the Downtown on the Bayou Festival,” Houma-Terrebonne Civic Center Director Janel Ricca said. “The fact that the Houma Chamber of Commerce has taken on the project of developing this festival is huge for our tourism industry that was affected by the oil spill.”

Best of the Bayou has also established a “Friends of the Festival” program in addition to corporate partnership opportunities. “We want to maintain Best of the Bayou as a free festival, but the event has to be self-sustaining,” Houma-Terrebonne chamber of Commerce President Drake Pothier said. “We appreciate all of the community and corporate support that we’ve received to date. We want to develop a long-term event [of which] Terrebonne Parish can be proud.”

Existing Best of the Bayou plans have the event surrounding the Courthouse Square with a main food court, highlighting two dozen restaurants and caterers from throughout Louisiana. Details for activities and other offerings have yet to be finalized.