The man behind the RNC balloon drop in Milwaukee is doing his 10th convention

Red, white and blue balloons falling from the ceiling of Fiserv Forum on July 18 will be among the lasting images of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

And to set up and execute that balloon drop, the RNC Committee on Arrangements turned to Treb Heining, who has been doing the balloon drops at Republican conventions since 1988.  This will be the first event Heining has done in Milwaukee since he did the balloon display for the opening of the then-Grand Avenue Mall in 1982.

“I can’t emphasize enough...the political conventions are probably the most stressful (event) that you’re going to work on,” Heining said. “Super Bowls are probably number two.”

Heining, based in California, said the RNC in Milwaukee will be his 10th convention and he’s already visited Fiserv Forum multiple times and knows the building “intimately.”

“I’ve been up on the catwalk several times on several different trips,” Heining said. “I did talk with some of the people running the building. It’s a magnificent facility. Very new and state of the art.”

Heining will spend the week before the convention putting the balloon system in place so the drop happens how he envisions.

“Every convention and every political group is different. Some like balloons on the stage, some people do not want the balloons on the stage,” Heining said. “Yeah, we look at the wind flow, we look at different things.”

MPS students and parents will help with balloon inflation

And he is relying on roughly 15 Milwaukee Public School students and their parents to help inflate more than 100,000 balloons.

By the evening of July 12, the balloons should be tucked in the proper netting waiting for their big moment.

“We always try things that are new and this one, my goodness, I’m going to pull out a lot of stops and I hope that it comes off the way that it is in my mind,” Heining said. “We never like to repeat. We always like to do things that people haven’t seen.”

Heining did not share the details of the plan for the Milwaukee balloon drop.

“Some of it is in the timing of what we’re going to do, some of it is in the product. There’s a few things that we will be doing that are unique,” Heining said. “Ultimately, it’s things that I’ve wanted to try for many years.”

Local balloon company disappointed

While Heining’s appointment for the gig might be predictable, the owner of a local balloon decorating company feels deflated.

In 2020, Brigette DuVal-Begos, of Brigette’s Bargain Balloons, hoped to get the contract for the Democratic National Convention planned for Milwaukee before the coronavirus pandemic canceled the event. Instead, she did a 500 balloon drop for Democratic volunteers in Milwaukee.

DuVal-Begos said the contract for the balloon drop going to an outside entity is “heartbreaking.”

“I thought the money was supposed to come here,” DuVal-Begos said. “It’s really weird.”

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The man behind the RNC balloon drop is doing his 10th convention