Two days before it kicks off, the free street festival 225Fest has moved back to Baton Rouge after organizers and St. George officials couldn't come to an agreement on a public safety plan for an event permit.

The street festival, created in 2022 to celebrate culture in the capital city, will switch from Airline Highway Park, within St. George boundaries, to the Baton Rouge Community College campus in Mid City. To accommodate the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade, the festival will not run on Saturday as in previous years but exclusively on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

"We made the decision to move back to Baton Rouge, where there were clear guidelines and processes and partners who were willing to collaborate, regardless of whatever took place, to make sure that the event was successful," 225Fest founder Myra Richardson said.

This year, organizers planned to hold the festival at Airline Highway Park, or the BREC fairgrounds, in St. George to avoid hosting an event downtown on the same day as the Spanish Town Parade.

But differences over the public safety portion of the event permit caused organizers to change the location. Richardson said the price tag of providing security in St. George for the festival made it difficult to justify keeping it there.

The festival also already had partners in Baton Rouge, she said, that made it easier to complete the permit process.

"It is disheartening," Richardson said. "It's a very difficult thing as an event organizer to have to make these hard decisions."

St. George Mayor Dustin Yates wrote in a statement that the festival's failure to provide a comprehensive public safety plan meant the city could not move forward with an event permit. St. George "cannot compromise" on security, he added.

"While it's unfortunate we were unable to approve their permit, the safety of our residents is paramount," Yates wrote.

St. George is a new city with its first mayoral election next month -- Yates was appointed interim mayor by Gov. Jeff Landry before those elections. Voters in the southeast part of the parish voted to create the new city in 2019, but a lengthy legal battle delayed it from getting up and running until this year.

Richardson said the situation is not about finding who is in the wrong. 225Fest is focused on providing an event that's accessible and continues to be free for the community, she said.

"I think that St. George is figuring it out," Richardson said. "I think that it is a new thing. I don't think it's malicious."