The streets of Butler won’t be the same this New Year’s Eve.

For the first time in a decade the city will be without a Ring in the Arts festival to celebrate the new year.

The Butler Arts Council has decided not to host the event this year due to financial limitations.

Larry Stock, the president of the council, said dwindling attendance and sparse donations have failed to support the event in recent years.

“I can’t in good conscience continue spending the council’s money without getting anything in return,” he said.

Stock, the brother of Mayor Maggie Stock, said the two of them helped create the festival a decade ago.

At that time the festival was very popular, featuring several activities, bands, and fireworks throughout the night.

“The first couple years we had 11 venues and 18 performers,” Larry Stock said. “We were all over downtown.”

A couple thousand people filled the streets during those years to take part.

“Back in the day it was a very colossal event,” Maggie Stock said, adding the council invested upward of $22,000 into the event at its height.

Most of the funding came through corporate donations and grants from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts.

But recent years have not been as kind to the festival.

Larry Stock said fewer than 200 people attended last year, despite the council offering free admission for the first time.

He said the council tried to rely on donations from spectators, but ultimately failed to break even on the roughly $5,000 spent on the event.

“It was too much money to spend to have a party for 150 people,” he said.

Maggie Stock attributed the emergence of other New Year’s celebrations throughout the county, such as the German New Year’s celebration in Harmony, for the cut in the attendance.

“There are a lot of things going on right now, so the audience gets spread thinner,” she said. “Rather than trying another year with 100 people showing up, we decided to walk away.”

Larry Stock said it was a tough call to end the festival after a decade.

“It’s very disappointing, but we had to be practical,” he said.

The council approached Butler Downtown to see if it would host the event, but the Main Street Program’s board agreed it wasn’t going to work this year.

“The board did not feel that we had enough time or resources to plan the event for this year,” said Chelynne Curci, the Main Street manager.

Curci said Butler Downtown does intend to host an event in 2014, but didn’t know if it would be a resurrection of Ring in the Arts or a new event.

While there will be no festival this year, neither Stock would rule out the possibility of it returning in the future.

“We have all the framework in place,” Maggie Stock said. “We just need a lot of people to make it happen.”

Larry Stock said he was happy about the run the event had downtown.

“It was always fun,” he said. “We had a great ride and I enjoyed doing it for a number of years.”

With no festival to fund, the council will turn its focus on other projects, most notably the Bill Lehnerd Scholarship for performing arts students at Butler County Community College.