After 36 years of art fairs and wiener dog races, Highland Fest is calling it quits.

The Highland Association Board of Directors posted the announcement on social media Friday night citing rising costs and higher demands on business owners as the main reasons for ending the neighborhood festival.

“It certainly was not an easy decision to make,” said James Farnsworth, spokesman for the association.

The free three-day festival in St. Paul’s southwestern neighborhood started as an art fair and over the years has grown to include a community picnic, beer garden, petting zoo, wiener dog races, a home expo, a 5k run, a car show and live performances.

Farnsworth said the decision had been mulled by overburdened business owners for a few years, but a double whammy of expenditures and loss of funds made it impossible to go forward in 2020.

A new city policy requires event organizers to pay St. Paul police for overtime, a change that would nearly triple security costs for the festival from $9,000 to $25,000, he said.

That cost could be lessened in the future, he said, if the city would agree to subsidize some of it. But that would not happen in time for 2020, because the funding would have to be included in the city’s annual budget.

Also this year, a funding source the festival often relies on was suspended.

The festival usually applies for and receives between $10,000 and $15,000 in grants from the city’s Cultural Star Funds. Organizers can only apply for these grants three years in a row. This would be the festival’s fourth year.

Besides these funding issues, Farnsworth said the festival has grown so big, it’s burning out the business owners that run it, causing some to spend six months working on it.

“It costs a lot for members to participate,” he said. They buy booths, staff the booths, pay employees, etc. and some become full-time event planners.

“For me, between now and August, it’s full-time Highland Fest,” he said. “It’s an event that we all cared about, but at the end of the day it was not allowing us to serve our other members.”

The association will have its hands full now that the former site of the Twin Cities Ford Motor Company is poised to become 122 acres of new apartments, townhomes, commercial and office space.

“There’s a lot of investment in the Ford site and we need to make sure that our organization is ready to welcome and accommodate all of the business development that is coming,” Farnsworth said.