GHMF: 2026 Season Update
Blog by GHMF Committee Chair Jerry T.
Each Spring for the past four years I have had the privilege of being able to give you an update and preview of our upcoming season, and so tonight have the honor of presenting to you once again! We have already begun our 2026 season on the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend, kicking off our 64th year of nightly performances.
Photo Credits: Arthena Colegrove
Since I was here last, we’ve have:
Added three new choreographers to our team, bringing us to 16 individuals creating content for the Fountain. These new folks are local to West Michigan but are part of a worldwide production team!
Weather permitting, we hope to play 113 shows this season, growing from the 107 scheduled for last year due to the longer season because of Labor Day being late this year.
We have already tested 53 new songs for this season, with 33 of them already being played and 1 more scheduled in the playlist for tonight.
The choreography team is actively working on 37 new songs, with 259 more to choose from that have already been approved by the Musical Fountain Committee. To put this song library growth into perspective, in 2024 we began the effort to recruit and train new choreographers and grow our song library, That year, we added 88 new songs and 8 new choreographers. Last year, we reached 110 more new songs and grew the team to a total of 13 choreographers. Before this season even started, we added three additional choreographers and completed 48 new songs. We anticipate that the team will surpass the 110 song benchmark from last year well before the season is over!
The continued rapid growth of our song library has grown our theme show playlists by another 20 for this season – it’s going to be a GREAT 2026 season with a continued fresh feeling to the Fountain!
Our social media engagement also continues to show that people love the Fountain! We started the season with around 49,000 followers and are already closing in on 53,000! Our posted videos are seeing upwards of 250,000 views weekly! Our social media theme this year is “A Bright Future”, and we’ve taken the beautiful graphics produced previously by Sarah Kalio and given them a “Neon GlowUp” to pair them with the Fountain getting new, brighter lights. Fans have taken notice and a liking to not only the Fountain’s new look, but that of our social media!
Our weekly work day on the hill is again Thursday this year and the Thursday Crew of now five volunteers have been hard at work since the beginning of March. As a team:
We held our annual Volunteer Day on Saturday, April 25, with another large group of helpful folks. A myriad of tasks were completed that day.
The Thursday Crew has been hard at work on some of the more complex and time consuming items like repacking the seals on Pump #2 (our third pump rebuild in three years) and completing the process of rebuilding our 20 primary water control valves.
We’ve also been battling some weirdness with these valves that we have finally tracked down to the size of the spare part oring used in the valve actuators. This spare part was determined to be the closest fit to the original OEM part. The OEM, Lee Engineering, is no longer in business and that has complicated the process of determining a more suitable part.
We continue to add to and accomplish the items on our Master Task List, and are now up to over 900 items completed since we started keeping track in 2021.
Between Volunteer Day and the Thursday Crew, we’ve completed 29 more of the tasks on our List, not including anything associated with the lighting upgrade.
So, I can confidently tell you once again that the Fountain is in better shape than it’s ever been, another reason that 2026 will be a GREAT season!
Looking back to the off-season, we completed the process of replacing the computers and monitors that store and play our shows each night. You may also know that during last year’s season, we got firm indications that the custom software used to choreograph songs and to play back songs was rapidly approaching the end of their useful life. The choreography package fell victim when an update in the underlying Java language it was written to run on deprecated the entire command structure that it was using. We recovered from this, at least temporarily, by having our choreographers roll back their Java software to a version that worked. The playback software sounded an even more impactful alarm when a Microsoft security update disabled that software and forced us to cancel that evening’s show until we could figure out what happened the next day. Again, a rollback to a prior version provided a temporary fix, but the two issues showed the tenuous situation we were in and that it was just a matter of time until some update we could not recover from took place.
So, over the off-season, Brad Boyink, who many of you know, and who owns a software company stepped up to rescue us. Brad used his 40 plus years of choreography experience, his own knowledge of computer coding and the Fountain itself, and the power of Artificial Intelligence programming assistance to completely rewrite both software packages. These new tools not only give us a contemporary solution to the aging risk of the old software, but also incorporate much more powerful capabilities to create choreography resulting in a nearly 50% reduction in the amount of time it takes to choreograph a song. This is a true paradigm shift which has not only streamlined the process of choreography, but has allowed relatively new choreographers to go through the learning curve much more quickly while simultaneously producing higher quality results. Truly a game changer!! Since the estimated cost of rewriting the software based upon historical software cost rules of thumb exceeded $120,000, Brad’s ability to complete this project at essentially no cost to the City was absolutely amazing!
Finally, you might also recall that I previously mentioned the work underway into the viability of upgrading our LED light fixtures, which were also feeling the inexorable effects of the constant improvement in all things technical. After testing showed that the replacement product being considered was VERY robust and highly capable, we moved ahead with that upgrade project and procured the fixtures during the season last year. At our Volunteer Day in April, we began the process of removing the 45 old fixtures, updated all of the cabling and infrastructure from the control room to the light fixtures in the pond, and installed 55 new light fixtures each 2-1/2 times brighter than the old ones, completing the project before the first show of this season. The results have been nothing short of spectacular! The Fountain is brighter and the colors more vibrant than ever, and now people are able to see our Fountain...from outer space!!
Truly, if you haven’t been to a show since the new lights have been installed, it is a remarkable improvement! We rolled out the fund raiser, Build A Brighter Future, about three weeks ago, and the initial response has been very promising. We set the campaign goal at $60,000, which exceeds the cost of the lighting itself, but takes into account some early indicators that the Fountain itself is suffering from the same aging process that we all do. We recently disabled one of our lesser-used features, the Front Curtain, because one of its two supply pipes had developed a leak. Additionally, the Bazooka, the arch that forms high over the entire Fountain, had one of its pipes spring a leak, too. When we investigated the source, we discovered that a 3” diameter pipe located just below the south nozzle had rusted through and the pipe broke off in our hands when we attempted to remove it with a pipe wrench. As one of our volunteers commented at he time, “Welcome to maintenance mode!” We know that we will likely be facing more issues of this type over the course of time, and want to be prepared for the inevitable costs associated with repairing them. Making sure the Fountain is Forever will require making sure that we have the funds to make it so! I’ll be reaching out to some of our media partners this week to get on the air to talk more about the Bright Future Campaign, but you can see it on our website (https://www.ghfountain.org/give-1)
Let me close by saying that it is still a fact that EVERYBODY in West Michigan loves the Fountain, and all of our volunteers are proud to be a part of the effort to keep the Fountain in great working order. I want to thank the City Council and all Fountain fans, wherever you might be, for your ongoing support of the Fountain! Let’s continue to work together to make sure that the Fountain is Forever!
