While last year\u2019s Fourth of July Liberation Day celebration was a one-day very limited on-the-ground celebration due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Saipan Mayor David M. Apatang wants a full-blown but controlled celebration this year.<\/p>\n
In line with this, Apatang is pushing for five consecutive evenings of activities at the Garapan Fishing Base and a full-day celebration on the Fourth of July, instead of the traditional nine-day festivities.<\/p>\n
Apatang has asked COVID-19 Task Force chair Warren F. Villagomez and Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. chief executive officer Esther L. Muna for approval and guidance on how to make this happen.<\/p>\n
The Liberation Day festivity is traditionally held in the days leading up to the July 4 parade.<\/p>\n
In his letter to Villagomez and Mu\u00f1a, the mayor is proposing to have the Fourth of July celebration end with a parade by mid-afternoon and then close with a spectacular fireworks show at 10pm.<\/p>\n
Apatang said that, similar to past celebrations, crowd control has always been the biggest item on the agenda when planning and carrying out the Fourth of July Liberation Day Festival.<\/p>\n
\u201cGranting us the go-signal to have an on-the-ground celebration this year will require that we multiply our crowd control efforts by at least two-fold to assure the safety of the public,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The mayor said the 2020 celebration was a drastic scaled-down version of the ones the people have become accustomed to because of the pandemic that reared its head early last year.<\/p>\n
Last year\u2019s celebration was held at the airport field in Dandan, with Tinian and Rota joining virtually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While last year\u2019s Fourth of July Liberation Day celebration was a one-day very limited on-the-ground…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":340154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}