What does it actually cost a city to keep a fifty-year tradition alive? For Roy this summer, the number was $33,000, and the answer the City Council landed on in early June was almost no.
On June 3, the Roy City Council signaled it was pulling the plug on the fireworks show that has capped Roy Days for as long as most residents can remember. Councilmember Jason Sphar posted the news to Facebook that night, citing severe drought, a tight city budget, and what he described as escalating safety concerns tied to the show. Within a week, the decision had been reversed by a text message that had nothing to do with the city's own budget process. The fireworks happened. The question the reversal never actually answered is whether Roy can count on that happening again next year, when the city marks what Speaker of the House Mike Schultz called its 90th birthday.
The Vote That Barely Moved the Needle
Here's the detail that got buried under the drama: cutting the fireworks would have saved the city roughly one percent of its total budget shortfall, according to reporting from Fox 13. Councilmember Diane Wilson, who sits on the Roy Days committee, put it plainly at the meeting: the city had already cut the easy stuff, and now it was reaching into the parts that actually hurt.
That framing matters. A one-percent line item is not the kind of cut that fixes a budget problem. It is the kind of cut a council makes when it needs to be seen making cuts, and fireworks are an easy target because they are visible, dramatic, and optional in a way that road maintenance or police staffing is not. The fireworks show became a symbol of austerity in a year when Roy was also weighing a 55 percent property tax increase, according to one resident's account of the council discussion. Whether trimming a $33,000 show actually changes that math is a separate question from whether it made a useful headline.
Fireworks weren't the only thing on the table that week. Also flagged for cuts:
- The annual repainting of the city's light poles, which Mayor Ann Jackson confirmed would not happen this year.
- Friday's slate of Roy Days events, though a handful of councilmembers pushed to protect the Salmon Bake specifically.
- A drone light show as a fireworks alternative, which the council explored and rejected because it would have cost more than traditional pyrotechnics and raised complications given the city's proximity to Ogden's airport.
Why the Show Moved to a Golf Course in the First Place
The parking complaints that came up during this debate weren't new, and they trace back to a specific incident. A firework detonated lower than intended during a past show, and the fire marshal required Roy to relocate the display to a location with a larger fallout zone. That's how the show ended up at Eagle Lake Golf Course, a nine-hole public course on the west side of the city that opened in 1972. The golf course solved a safety problem and created a new one: limited parking that makes it harder for residents who live farther from the course to actually watch the show they're paying for.
That's the kind of detail that explains why "just move it back" was never a serious option on the table. The relocation wasn't a preference. It was a fire marshal's requirement, and reversing it would mean reopening a safety conversation the city had already settled once.
What the Farmers Market Actually Said
City council meetings are one read on public sentiment. The Roy Farmers Market, where reporters caught residents in the days after the announcement, was a more direct one. Of more than a dozen people interviewed, only one said they were indifferent to the news.
"Honestly, I'm super disappointed," said lifelong Roy resident Kelsee Dunlap. Resident Kirstla Ostler added, "So it's actually kind of sad." Matt and Chelsea Fife questioned where the city's property tax revenue was going if not toward the show residents expect every year, and Nicole Gibbs pointed to the timing: 2026 marks the nation's 250th anniversary, and cutting fireworks in that specific year struck several residents as the wrong year to make that particular cut.
There's a detail in that last point worth sitting with. George E. Wahlen Park, where Roy Days is centered, is named for a Navy corpsman who earned the Medal of Honor for actions on Iwo Jima and later became a Roy citizen in 1969. The park that almost lost its signature night wasn't just any patch of ground. It carries a name tied directly to the kind of American story residents were invoking when they argued the 250th anniversary was the wrong year to go dark.
The Check That Solved a Problem the City Never Actually Solved
The reversal came fast, and it came from outside city hall entirely. Mayor Jackson told the council on June 10 that she'd received a text the day after the cancellation announcement from Mike Schultz, Utah's Speaker of the House, offering to cover the show through the Mike and Melissa Schultz Family Foundation. His donation wasn't $33,000. It was $35,000, with the extra two thousand earmarked, in Jackson's words, toward making it "the best in the county." A second, anonymous donor stepped forward separately to cover the cost of the police detail working the event.
Schultz represents Roy in the legislature and told reporters he attended high school there, though he lives in neighboring Hooper. In his own statement, he said he saw that the area he'd called home his entire life needed help celebrating, and that he and Melissa were happy to participate. He also connected the moment to the following year, when Roy will mark what he called its 90th birthday, and said he wanted the tradition intact for that milestone specifically.
Councilmember Janel Hulbert, who had pushed publicly to save the show, called the donations "a wonderful example of our community coming together." She also confirmed something worth noting on its own: despite the drought and safety language in the initial announcement, budget was the actual driver of the decision. Drought and safety were mentioned. Cost was the reason.
What Roy's 90th Birthday Inherits
None of this means the underlying problem got fixed. It means it got covered, once, by a donor whose foundation happens to exist and happens to have ties to Roy specifically. That's a fine outcome for one summer. It is not a funding mechanism, and nothing in this year's resolution creates one going into next year's anniversary celebration.
If Roy's council is weighing the same trade-off next June, the arithmetic will look almost identical. A show that costs the city somewhere in the neighborhood of $33,000 will still represent roughly one percent of whatever gap the budget shows that year. The politics of cutting a visible, popular tradition to signal fiscal discipline will still be available to whoever wants to use them. And the fix that worked this year, a personal relationship between the mayor and a sitting legislator, is not something a city can build a budget line around.
For residents who spent July watching the Miss Roy Scholarship Competition at Roy High School, catching the Roy Days Art Show at the Southwest Branch Library, or bringing kids to the splash pad at George E. Wahlen Park before the parade, the show going on this year probably felt like the story ending well. The more accurate read is that the story paused. Whether Roy Days still has fireworks for its 90th celebration depends on whether the city finds a way to fund the tradition that doesn't depend on someone with the Speaker of the House's number in their phone.
If you're settling into Roy and want the kind of read on this community that goes past the festival calendar, that's exactly the conversation Great Scott Real Estate Team has with clients every week. Let's Connect.
