Something special is planned for the annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Coloma next month.

The Coloma City Council in January approved a motion allowing Great Lakes Drone Company and Starlight Aerial Productions to put on a drone show on March 15. Matt Quinn with Great Lakes Drone Company says it’ll be best visible downtown.

“We’re bringing back the drone light show for the St. Patrick’s Day parade right after the parade in downtown Coloma,” Quinn said.

Starlight’s Haley Carpenter tells us when a community books a drone show, the process is similar to planning a fireworks show. It all starts with contacting the company.

“We start trying to get the initial plan of where we’re going to perform the show, where your audience is going to be, where we’re going to take off, all the logistics sides of that, and then we get into the creative side of it and begin to figure out what our audience is looking for and what the community is trying to put out to our audience,” Carpenter said. “Once that creative side is started, then I begin actually creating our show. And then within a couple of months, we’ll have a show for everybody to see.”

The process comes with strict safety protocols. Quinn says drone technology is improving all of the time, so the shows have the potential to get better each year. Great Lakes Drone Company also put on a display at last year’s Coloma St. Paddy’s Day celebration.

The Coloma City Council motion approved last month will allow Great Lakes Drone Company and Starlight Aerial Productions to use Coloma Board of Public Works property as a staging area. The show will begin right after the parade, which is scheduled for 8:15. The show should be about 15 minutes.