Crank up the volume? Neighbors beg to differ
Three days of concerts could draw 40,000 fans to Overland Park Golf Course next year
Starting next year, rock bands and other music acts could take up residence for a long weekend each September on Denver’s oldest golf course, blasting performances from a main stage on the driving range for tens of thousands of cheering fans.
Helene Orr and Rob Lovell both live less than a block behind that stage, across the street from Overland Park Golf Course. They have very different visions about how New York City-based Superfly Productions’ proposed three-day music festival — which promoters hope will draw 30,000 to 40,000 fans a day in the first year — might affect the neighborhood.
Orr, to put it simply, senses a disaster in the making.
“It was never really about making sure the neighborhood had a say,” the 35-year neighborhood resident suggested about city officials’ review of the plans. She lamented: “I will never have a quiet fall in my home again.”
But Lovell, who moved in five years ago on West Jewell Avenue, views the festival as the latest exciting development in south Denver, building on the opening Thursday of the
Levitt Pavilion outdoor concert venue at nearby Ruby Hill Park. He’s liked what he’s heard from the festival promoter’s representatives.
“I listened to them lay out quite a bit of plans of how they’re going to deal with the challenges,” he said, “and I heard nothing that would dampen my initial enthusiasm for it.”
On Monday, Superfly’s 42-page contract for use of the golf course lands in the City Council for a decision. Its members will hear that night from some of the festival proposal’s many vocal supporters and opponents during a one-hour public hearing; they could vote Monday but probably will wait a week, some said.
If it approves Superfly’s lease agreement, the council will seal Denver’s five-year commitment for a fourstage event that could close the golf course for five weeks after Labor Day each year — including for setup and tear-down of the festival — and raise money for city coffers, municipal golf courses and a community improvement fund. Unless Superfly breaches the terms, resulting in cancellation, the festival could stick around even longer.
The council’s consideration follows more than seven months of community debate that has produced deep splits around Overland Park.
Disagreements have been sharpest in Orr and Lovell’s area — in seven blocks that are just south of the golf course that are the only residential area not buffered from the future festival grounds by the South Platte River or by Santa Fe Drive and the railroad tracks.
Where Lovell sees careful plans taking shape that will blunt the festival’s bleedover effects on the neighborhood, Orr senses empty promises that Superfly and its partners can’t possibly deliver. That’s despite assurances given to neighbors by the Denver Office of Special Events and the Parks and Recreation department that they will hold Superfly to its commitments, including submitting a dozen or so logistical plans ahead of each year’s event.
Officials also promise that sound monitoring will happen to ensure Superfly follows the city’s noise ordinance.
The contract requires Superfly to pay $200,000 in rent for use of the course and $90,000 for landscaping work. Greens and tee boxes, along with natural areas on the course, must be fenced off.
Other terms require Superfly to pay $25,000 to fund discounts at other city courses for Overland golfers who are displaced during the closure.
The real money — $1 million to $2 million or more — could come from the city’s collection of its 10 percent ticket tax. Superfly also will contribute $2 per ticket to the city’s Golf Enterprise Fund, benefiting all golf courses, and $1 per ticket to the community fund, which Superfly co-founder Rick Farman says will collect “five to six figures” each year.
The festival would be able to run from noon to 10 p.m., with possible dates on the second or third weekend each September.
Superfly’s festival would put Denver on the national music festival map with a recurring event that could grow to draw a maximum 80,000 attendees a day, per the contract.
The company next month will put on the 10th Outside Lands festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, a setting near neighborhoods that Farman sees as similar to Overland Park — though Denver’s 139-acre golf course is about one-seventh the size. Superfly also produces the 15-year-old Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in rural Tennessee. Denver’s event is among a handful of new festivals Superfly is trying to launch.
Farman, the Superfly cofounder, said Outside Lands’ run hasn’t been without neighborhood hiccups.
“We’re surrounded by significant neighborhoods, and we’ve been able to figure out how to engineer all these things in a way that has minimal impact,” he said. “No one should tell you that there’s going to be no impact — that’s part of what living in an urban environment is about.”
But he said Superfly should be judged based on how it addresses challenges that arise.
Surveys and other outreach by city officials suggest large numbers of people are supportive in the wider city or at least felt Superfly’s representatives, including local event producer David Ehrlich, addressed their concerns during meetings.
Opposition focuses on environment, park use
But there’s also a healthy opposition that has to risen to oppose the festival based on worries about noise, environmental and wildlife impact, and logistical challenges.
For Orr and some others, there’s also strong philosophical disagreement that the event would ever be appropriate for parkland, even on a golf course, and they have raised legal concerns.
In the immediate area next to the course, Lovell is among just a handful of vocal supporters. Orr came armed to a council committee meeting June 20 with a map of the area’s 126 homes and suggested that petition canvassing by her and other opponents had rallied most residents there against the festival.
She held the map aloft, and most of the homes were shaded green, signifying opposition. Only a handful were pink to indicate support.
“We were assured repeatedly throughout this process … that if the neighborhood didn’t want this, it wouldn’t happen,” Orr wrote Thursday in an email to council members. “Yet we are here. Why is that?”
Laurie K. Paulson, who also lives on Jewell across from the golf course, was among opponents who said city efforts to notify residents about the festival proposal and community meetings — focused largely on online outreach as well as some fliers — missed some elderly residents and Spanish-speakers, who heard about it first from the petition circulators.
For Paulson, health concerns are at the top of her mind, because she says she has a degenerative disease and has a service dog. She worries about noise from the festival, which she compared to having “Woodstock in your backyard.”
“What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sedate my service dog when all of this commotion is going on?” she said. “It kind of defeats the purpose.”
There are influential voices in support of the festival, including the Overland Park Neighborhood Association’s leadership. Among them is secretary Terry Pasqua, who lives a stone’s throw from the course.
There’s also the possibility that, as Lovell and other suggest, opponents are simply more passionate about speaking up than quiet supporters.
Orr and others portray city officials, including the area’s councilman, Jolon Clark, as appearing to work on Superfly’s behalf to rally support. But Mara Owen, the association’s president, credits officials and Superfly for reaching out early and answering neighbors’ questions and concerns quickly.
Owen wants to see the festival happen because it would open Overland Park to more people.
“We actually would have utilization of previously inaccessible park land for (most) people in our neighborhood and in Denver. Not many people in our neighborhood actually golf,” said Owen, who lives farther southeast of the course, closer to Broadway. “We have this beautiful piece of land that says ‘No trespassing’ on it,’ unless visitors pay to play golf.
City would require several plans from Superfly
City officials have said they will closely scrutinize the several plans required of Superfly, covering everything from security to preventing parking in the neighborhoods to restoring the golf course’s turf condition after the event. Superfly also plans to have a 24-hour hotline residents can call to report problems.
Superfly and city officials aim to make it a car-free festival, with music fans arriving via bike, shuttles from parking lots in central Denver and light rail to the Evans Station. Transit riders then would trek to entrances on the north side of the golf course, away from immediate neighborhoods, though there are pedestrian access issues to overcome. A proposed $937 million bond package this year includes a pedestrian bridge that would help address those issues, but not in time for the first festival.
The organizers, which at one point included AEG Live, first reached out to parks officials in April 2016. Months before they and Clark were ready to start contacting neighborhood groups that fall, officials said, they sent a delegation to Outside Lands in August to vet Superfly.
The group, which included the parks maintenance director, viewed a couple days of setup and talked to counterparts in San Francisco city government.
“All across the board, everybody gave absolutely great references,” recalled Fred Weiss, Parks and Rec’s director of finance and administration.
The final version of the contract came out Tuesday, and council members have said they won’t necessarily rush to approve it.
“My position from the beginning,” Councilman Paul Kashmann said, “has been that for (the festival) to take place, I think the neighborhood needs to be better for being there than if it didn’t take place.”
The council is set to meet and have the public hearing on the festival proposal at 5:30 p.m. Monday in its fourth-floor chambers in the City and County Building.