Lilac Parade route halved as Spokane tries to control ballooning costs

May 14-This year's Lilac Festival parade will follow a new downtown route that is about half as long due to new city rules designed to save on the cost of security and other services.

Organizers are expecting 60,000 people to watch the Armed Forces Torchlight Parade beginning at 7:45 p.m. Saturday. While that is down from a peak of 75,000 attendees, the number of organizations marching in the parade has risen to 160.

Traditionally, the parade route began after marching bands and floats emerged from the Washington Street tunnel, crossed the Spokane River and hit their stride starting at Spokane Falls Boulevard. The route went four blocks to First Avenue and then weaved back and forth through much of downtown until ending at the corner of Post Street and Spokane Falls Boulevard.

Now, parade entries will travel the two blocks from Spokane Falls to Riverside Avenue before weaving downtown and ending the parade at Spokane City Hall.

"We're packing the same amount of parade in half the space," Spokane Lilac Festival Association spokesperson Elisabeth Hooker said. "We're not worried about those in the parade, but we want those attending to be careful when squeezing in with each other."

The smaller route is an effort for the city to control its costs in hosting large parades.

In 2022, hoping to recoup some of the ballooning expenses for providing city services to parades and other special events, the Spokane City Council implemented a new fee schedule that organizers would have to pay to defray just a portion of the city's expenses. The fees were $0 that year but were slated to increase significantly over the next three years; in 2024, the Lilac Parade had to pay $10,000, and organizers were scheduled to pay $20,000 by 2025.

But in early 2025, worried that the burden on event organizers was too high, Mayor Lisa Brown issued an executive order freezing all special event fees at their 2024 levels indefinitely. When the 2025 Lilac Parade coursed through downtown streets, organizers paid the city a little more than $10,000; meanwhile, the city spent roughly $94,000 in total to provide police, firefighters, garbage services and street closures, losing $84,000 after the fees were paid. Police salaries alone cost more than $58,000 to protect the event. Providing a sizable police presence at special events also pulls officers away from scheduled vacations or from other areas of the city.

In November, in a bid to control the city's costs without passing a large bill to event organizers, the Brown administration created three standardized parade routes in downtown Spokane that event organizers could choose from. But even the largest of them was roughly half the size of the route that the Lilac Parade once marched.

"Parades and community events are an important part of Spokane's identity, but they also require significant city resources," Brown wrote in a Thursday statement. "As we navigate budget constraints, we have a responsibility to look for ways to reduce costs where we can. To support event organizers, we froze event fees, which were scheduled to double, and gave organizers a year's advanced notice about standardizing routes to help with planning and coordination."

Hooker said the Spokane Lilac Festival Association had been "preparing to work up to" pay the $20,000 for this year's parade when the mayor froze the amount to $10,000.

"It was a pleasant surprise. We were not a part of the discussion that led to that decision," Hooker said.

But the Lilac Festival Association hopes to see a return to the original route in future years and is willing to pay more for the privilege, Hooker added. Parades across the region have a standard length of 28 to 30 city blocks, Hooker said. Maintaining that size in Spokane makes parades much more of a draw to those coming into Spokane for events.

"We would like to keep that original route. The Lilac festival parade should be a showcase event for Spokane," she said.

In a Thursday interview, Councilman Michael Cathcart agreed that the city needed to control how much it was spending on special events like Bloomsday or the Lilac Parade, and providing low-cost standardized routes was probably a good solution. But event organizers should have the option to take a different, more expensive route, he argued - so long as they're paying the difference.

"We've got to be recuperating costs, and either we're doing that through a reduction in what's necessary to help the parade function or through higher fees," Cathcart said.

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This story was originally published May 14, 2026 at 11:44 PM.