While the past several summers have been colored by hot air balloons drifting above Pennington Biomedical Research Center, those balloons will be changing course after Pennington announced Wednesday it will no longer host the Baton Rouge hot air balloon championship.
Last summer’s balloon championships were canceled amid severe storms when lightning struck a tree near festival patrons, which is part of the reason Pennington will no longer host the championships.
“The reasons were logistics and safety,” said Guy LaVergne, Pennington’s assistant executive director of operations in a prepared statement. “There are currently new construction projects on and near the exact site of the Balloon Festival. In addition, we were very concerned about the near-tragic lightning strike last year.”
But while Pennington will no longer host the event, it won’t affect the balloon championships’ sponsorships because Pennington was not a sponsor for the Louisiana Balloon Foundation.
“We’ve only been providing the grounds for the event, not the resources,” said Angela Gravelles, a Pennington communications representative.
Several media outlets reported the change was also a result of Pennington’s $340,503 midyear budget cut, but Pennington’s statement didn’t mention the cut, nor did its midyear budget reduction plan reflect a reduction in facilities.
Pennington took that cut after LSU absorbed half of the research center’s original cut as part of their resource sharing agreement.
“These reductions will reduce support services for our research enterprise, mainly in the area of operational support,” Pennington reported to the LSU System Board of Supervisors. ”It will also put one research program on indefinite suspension.”
 
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Contact Andrea Gallo at [email protected]