Larimer to mull plan for August music festival
FORT COLLINS – Promoters of a three-day music festival planned for late August west of Loveland that they say could attract up to 13,500 attendees will present their plan Monday night to Larimer County officials at a public land-use hearing. However, the county’s development-services team is recommending that county commissioners reject the application.
The Rocky Mountains division of AEG Presents, a major event promoter that books events around the nation and world, including at such area venues as Red Rocks and Fiddlers Green amphitheaters and Broomfield’s 1st Bank Center, is proposing to hold its inaugural AEG Music Festival Aug. 25-27 at Sunrise Ranch, two miles north of U.S. Highway 34 west of Loveland. The property previously has hosted music festivals, including the “Arise” festival in 2019, but this one would be on a newly created 35-acre parcel east of Larimer County Road 29.
Ned Garthe, AEG’s manager of special projects for the Rocky Mountain region, told BizWest that the event would encompass “a number of music genres.” The plan for the weekend festival indicates that the site would open for recreational-vehicle and tent camping beginning at 4 p.m. Thursday, with patrons leaving by noon on the following Monday. The festival would include three stages, with curfews varying from 10 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., along with food and beverage vendors, an activities tent, a general store, water stations, eight major banks of toilets, and parking spaces for 5,400 vehicles.
The county’s Development Services Team has advised the Board of Larimer County Commissioners not to approve the application because the application doesn’t sufficiently address all the criteria in the Land Use Code as well as serious concerns about safety and security and the timing of the event, which coincides with other major events in the area such as the Corn Festival in Loveland and the Venus de Miles bicycle road tour that also would include County Road 29.
Justin Whitesell, emergency operations director in the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office, wrote to commissioners that “the permit detail does not mention coordinating or implementing evacuations in the event of a wildland fire. If a wildland fire threatens the event, evacuations would be complex and chaotic. Quickly evacuating more than 14,000 personnel would take several hours, increasing traffic congestion along Highway 34.
“The permit detail mentions camping and ride-sharing,” Whitesell wrote, “which increase potential problems during evacuations. Patrons camping will need longer to secure their camping equipment and RVs properly, increasing the patrons’ time to evacuate. Patrons who ride-share will not have a vehicle on site in the event of an immediate evacuation” and the event site is “not adequate to shelter in place.”
The sheriff’s office also expressed concern about its ability to handle security for multiple large events simultaneously, although AEG’s application stated that it would employ a private security firm.
In 2017, the special-events section of the Larimer County Land Use Code began to restrict properties from applying for special-events permits if they had prior approvals with conditions limiting the sizes of gatherings. At that time, Sunrise Ranch became ineligible for such a permit because the property owner, Devine Emissaries, limited the size of gatherings there to 170 people. By 2018, the Arise Music Festival had been held on the property for five years. Larimer County approved events in summer 2018 but notified the applicant that it would need to amend the land-use approval for the site if it wanted to host the event in 2019. Sunrise Ranch began to amend the special-review approval, but county documents state it has not continued or completed that process since then.
County staff, in its recommendation to reject the application as presented, noted that “surrounding residents have expressed concerns about noise for the years that large events have been held on the property and about the late hours for the amplified music. They have previously requested a maximum level of sound that the festival sponsors have not addressed.”
County planners have received several comments in favor of AEG’s festival plan and several opposed. Opponents cited concerns regarding traffic, noise, and the impact to the area.
If commissioners choose to approve the application despite the project team’s recommendation for rejection, the team is recommending that AEG update its plan to meet Land Use Code criteria, propose a wildfire evacuation plan satisfactory to the sheriff’s office, guarantee that no part of the event be held on the Sunrise Ranch property west of County Road 29, submit a plan for neighborhood outreach and a 24-hour phone number by which persons may contact the applicant, and establish a “sold out” limit of 9,000 patrons at any single time during the festival, as was in effect in 2019, the last year the “Arise” festival was held before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The hearing will begin at 6:30 p.m. Monday in the first-floor hearing room of the county administration building at 200 W. Oak St. in Fort Collins. The hearing is also accessible via Zoom.
Source: BizWest
