Fountain group takes on Christmas light display

The city’s Musical Fountain Committee has decided to take on a Spring Lake Township man’s Christmas light show that attracted tens of thousands of people to his home late last year.

Fountain committee Chairman Roger Jonas said the committee decided Tuesday that it would form a subcommittee to oversee the light display in a location somewhere in Grand Haven. Potential sites have been narrowed down to Harbor Island and Dewey Hill, he said.

“It’s designed to be, through donations, to raise funds for a charity and for the Musical Fountain, and that’s why we felt it belonged under our committee,” Jonas explained.

The display was created by Brad Boyink and operated at his home on Heather Court in Spring Lake Township for the first time last year. He estimates around 60,000 people visited the display between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, and donations in that five-week period resulted in $20,038 that Boyink gave to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Michigan. He said there may be more donations that were made online through the foundation’s Web site, www.wishmich.org.

While the donations made the show a success, the high traffic it brought to Boyink’s neighborhood created a safety problem, and he decided it needed a more public location in 2007. In fact, he closed it a few days early because of the traffic.

“It was getting too dangerous,” he told the Tribune for a Dec. 30 story. “People were crossing the double yellow line on West Spring Lake Road, and we actually had someone drive down the bike path — and there were people on it.”

Boyink has been the technical adviser for Grand Haven’s Musical Fountain since May 2006, and he talked to Jonas about the committee absorbing the Christmas light display.

“It became very apparent that if I wanted to do it again, I would have to move it to another location,” Boyink said Wednesday. “I looked at other area parks, and Grand Haven had the only one I thought would work. … It really needed to be under a city’s control because of the liability issue, having a better location to expand, and it made the most logical choice being under the Musical Fountain Committee because they already deal with (a similar) production.”

Boyink said he is pushing to put the display on Harbor Island. He said adding the light display to Dewey Hill in December would interfere with the giant Nativity Scene, a tradition there since 1964. In addition, the scale of the light show on the hill would have to be greatly enlarged to be viewed from across the river, which Boyink said would be cost prohibitive.

Jonas said having the show on Dewey Hill would give the city a new “major tourist attraction” to promote, and the island location is not part of the Musical Fountain Committee’s dominion.

The next step, Boyink said, is to get approval from City Council. Once that happens, he plans to find corporate sponsors so there is no city money paying for the display’s operation, something both Jonas and Boyink said was essential.

Boyink also plans to keep the display affiliated with the Michigan Make-A-Wish Foundation as a contribution source for the children’s charity.

Building the new display will be expensive, but using commercial-grade lighting can be cost-effective in the long run, Boyink said.

“The first year could cost $50,000 to $70,000 to do it right,” he said.

But Boyink said the higher-grade LED lights he used last year at his home are cheaper to operate than common Christmas lights. He said his electric bill for December, while operating the big light display at this home, was just over $100 — or 20-percent less than December 2005 when he ran a display of giant inflatables.

A video of Boyink’s display from last month is available to download from the Musical Fountain’s Web site: www.ghmfsoftware.com/lights. Boyink said he plans to add new footage of the display to the site this weekend.