The purpose of this document is to propose to the Texas Tech University to act as the host of an annual festival to be celebrated at the end of the last weekend of February. This event will be called Tortillafest.

The spring semester at Texas Tech University is usually a bleak one. The weather is practically terrible through most of the semester with Easter weekend and Spring Break summarizing the only highlights of the semester. What if there was one more highlight to add to our semesters? What if there was a way for Texas Tech University to honor its history, appease students, and become a destination for on-campus activities?

I would like to present the idea of an annual festival called Tortillafest. Tortillafest will be a 2-day festival located on Texas Tech Campus. The event will begin Friday afternoon and carry on until Saturday night. We can turn a relatively boring weekend of school into a campus-wide celebration of the school history and pride.

The events of the festival will be the best part. We can invite local businesses to come to a local job fair. We can have speakers to come give lectures and motivational speeches. We can have musicians come play for crowds of students. Although, this event will collide with possible basketball, tennis, track, softball and baseball events. I think Tortillafest will help increase the attendance of these events instead of decreasing them. We can have our own mini ACL or Chilifest, like our neighbors to the south.

Not only will we have auditorial entertainment, we can have gustatory entertainment. We will have a tortilla, margarita, and Chilton competitions. Having a buy-in for teams and having sponsorships for ingredients is a great way to provide easy entertainment and nourishment for the poor hungry student body. We can even invite big-name judges (I'm looking at you, Gordon Ramsey) and even the food network to come and network this event.

All of the increased foot traffic will need to be fed to be happy. We can have local food trucks come in and set up around the memorial circle. This will help provide local restaurants with an opportunity for increased revenue and presence in the Texas Tech community. As much as we love the TTU food truck, the Chimys truck is a little more exciting. Can you even imagine having a Chuys, Captial Pizza, or Jalisco's food trucks also!?

Now all of this sounds awesome, but let's look at some numbers. During a usual college music festival, such as Chilifest and ACL, the event can often impact a local economy with more than 100 million dollars from event expenditures and festival operations. Granted, these are well-renowned events with people traveling to them from all across the world. However, who says that Tortillafest can't be on that level one day?

We may start off small, but the Red Raider community has proven itself to be a force when the community pulls together. We can create that pull through Tortillafest. Tortillafest will be a charity event of our choosing. We can even change the charity annually to address certain local, state, or even national issues that need our support. Imagine getting to party with your best friends and family in Raiderland, while the profits from the event go to helping hurricane, tornado, or even mass shooting victims.

We can collaborate with music promoters as a source to recruit big-name artists as a draw to Tortillafest. By receiving the campus seal of approval, we would be able to reach out to the best current artists and promoters, since we would have the support of the university instead of being a low-key fraternity party.

Since we would need to raise money for all of the cost of the events. We would sell tickets to the festival. Sponsorships will help keep the price of tickets low. Of course, we would need to prove ourselves for the businesses to want to actually sponsor our event. Local businesses will help out a lot during our first couple years until we can get large enough attendance numbers to bring in big sponsors. Thankfully, the increase in traffic flow throughout Lubbock during the event will always bring lots of revenue to local businesses willing to support us.

Now that we have a good blueprint to how to bring this event into existence, we need to iron out a couple details. Locations will be key. I think the United Spirit Arena will be the best place for concerts since it is weatherproof while having great parking options. However, my dream is still having at least some of the competitions and smaller concert venues at memorial circle. I think the energy of packing the engineering key with food trucks and concert platforms would be amazing and add to the draw of the event.

I hope this proposal makes it to the right eyes to make it happen. I am going to do all I can to see this idea come to life. Who made the rule that Lubbock had to be boring? Let us come together and make Tortillafest a thing. We don't have to succumb to being boring. Share with your friends! Share with your parents! #Tortillafest2019