Volunteer burnout is threatening to kill a popular Hamilton street festival.

The day-long Locke Street music and food event held every September for the last 16 years has lost its all-volunteer organizing committee and is within two weeks of missing its chance to get city support or to book acts for this year.

One notice circulated among Locke Street Business Improvement Area members says clearly "Due to lack of volunteers, the Locke Street Festival will not take place in 2016," but leaders of the association say there is still hope.

"We are still working on it, it's not 100 per cent 'No' yet, we're still working on it," said BIA chair Tony Greco. "It's an institution and we want to keep it going."

Greco said the problem facing the festival is simple volunteer burnout — the same volunteers have run the event for the last three years and they're tired.

"When you own a business you want it to run well and something like this takes a lot of time," Greco said. "We don't have any paid staff for this, we do it from the heart."

The 2015 edition of the festival, staged Sept. 12, featured acts such as the Sons of Italy Choir, Rocket Robin, jazz-man James-Alphonse, Joe Suffoletta and Maria Giavedoni, Judy Rideout and The Conway Twitters. That's in addition to almost 200 vendor booths up and down the street and specials offered by many of the street's permanent businesses.

Greco said BIA members are targeting the same time period this year "and we are working very hard to make it happen."

If an event similar to past festivals can't be stage, Greco said something can still be mounted.

"If it turns out to be a no then we'll have a replacement," he said. "There are things we can fall back on, but I'm not ready to talk about them right now."

The last three versions of the event were headed by music store owner Jamie Reid, but he has stepped down from the position.

Greco denied rumours of conflict between Reid and others.

"There is no conflict," he said. "We have come together as one single BIA for this."

Reid could not be reached for comment. His son Mason said he knew nothing about the event and its future, preferring not to be involved with the BIA.

"Jamie has been away for the last eight months doing other things," Reid said. "Somebody from the BIA came around and said cancelling it was something they were considering, but that's all I know about it.

"I'm not involved with the BIA, I still have brown hair and they'd turn it gray fast," he said.

Epic Books owner Jaime Krakowski, who was a member of the 2015 organizing committee, backed Greco's view.

"I wouldn't go so far as to say it won't happen," she said. "The entire committee resigned at the end of last year because we felt we were running out of volunteer hours.

"Right now we're asking if there's a different way we can do this," she added.

Krakowski said it's not too late to get an event arranged for September.

"We didn't really start planning until March of last year so I think we could still do it," she said. "We need to do this because it's not just for merchants, it's really a celebration of our community."

Catherine Corey, co-owner of the soon-to-close Cheese Shoppe on Locke, said some BIA members have been unhappy with the way the festival has been staged.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

She noted it has too often conflicted with Supercrawl and their arguments for a festival running later in the evening or offering a second event earlier in the year were being ignored.

"There is a group that really wants the festival to run later, but they're not being listened to," she said.

Despite that concern, she still supports the venture as an exercise in community building.