If it were up to the Waalwijk municipal council, 50,000 euros would be made available for a new variant of De 80 van de Langstraat. Last week, the board of the walking event announced that it had to stop. The causes: a lack of volunteers, increased costs and increasing regulations.
The news that De 80 van de Langstraat will stop came as a bombshell last week, according to Mikos Boskan, councilor for the VVD in Waalwijk. “I spoke to many residents last week and it is only about De 80. The event should not disappear, because it is part of Waalwijk,” he says.
Together with other council members, he submitted a motion to release money for a restart of a similar initiative. The motion was adopted on Tuesday evening. “As far as we are concerned, 50,000 euros will be urgently released and reserved for new initiators who want to go ahead and save the event,” says Boksan.
New initiative
New initiators have already emerged to take over. On the website Friends of the 80’s an appeal is made to people who were previously involved in the walking event. “But if action is not taken now to organize it this year, it will be very difficult next year,” the municipal councilor fears.
According to him, it remains to be seen whether the number of volunteers who stand up will be enough for a new walking event: “I have already registered as a volunteer and I feel the urgency from residents, but there is still a lot that is unclear at the moment. In any case, we must do everything we can to ensure that the event is not lost.”
Chairman Thijs van Beurden of the De 80 van de Langstraat Foundation is surprised by the decision of the municipal council. “It is very nice that the municipality is willing to make money available, but a restart of the foundation is not possible,” he says.
‘Mustard after the meal’
“The brand name De 80 van de Langstraat is protected. The name or anything similar to it may therefore not be used again and the foundation no longer exists,” he explains. According to the chairman, a walking event with a new name can be organized: “We are not going to stand in the way of new initiatives. It is actually beautiful.”
However, the adopted motion comes as a surprise to the former board. “As a foundation, we have often sounded the alarm and said that the event was about to collapse and then nothing was possible from the municipality. As a result, we had to make the difficult decision to stop. The municipal council’s decision therefore comes too late for us,” says Van Beurden.
