Love Fest fine was based on race, landowner says
Official says he was responding to complaint
After a year’s hiatus, outdoor concerts returned to Alpine Valley Music Theatre in the summer of 2018. So did the spin-off festivals.
Nearly 300 people attended Wisco Family Love Fest in June at a tree farm about four miles from where Dead & Company performed two nights at Alpine Valley.
Now two former Walworth County prosecutors say the county’s zoning office unlawfully cited their client who hosted the event because he’s AfricanAmerican.
John Neighbors, 37, said a friend suggested the event, for which they charged people $100 to spend up to three nights at his property on County Highway ES. Nearly 300 people spent the weekend partying, camping, listening to other bands, and shuttling back
and forth to the Dead show.
No violence at Love Fest
Love Fest had its own security and there were no overdoses or violence, but Neighbors got hit with six zoning violations with fines totaling $3,900 for operating a campground without the proper permit, in an area zoned for agriculture.
His attorneys, Daniel Necci and Cody Horlacher, say their client is the victim of selective prosecution and that the citations should be dismissed.
“It is well known that camping on one’s own property is a frequent occurrence in the county and many other Caucasian families have held similar gatherings without being prosecuted,” the lawyers said in a statement.
“That Neighbors is the sole victim of ... enforcement for this type of ‘violation’ is clear proof that it was racially motivated.”
Neighbors said after he learned that no one else was ever cited for holding similar events, “It was hard to put a pen to the checkbook and give the county almost $4,000 of my hard-earned money. I then would forfeit my ability to tell my girls to stand up for what’s right.”
His attorneys dispute that Neighbors’ one-time event amounted to running a campground. The ordinance is so broadly worded, they say, that even a father sleeping out in a tent with his own children could be deemed in violation.
Mini-festivals common near Alpine Valley
Plus, they say that hosting music fans or small festivals on rural private property is very common in Walworth County, and yet no one else has been cited in the last 10 years.
Their motion to dismiss includes affidavits from a former sheriff ’s deputy, a federal drug agent, and a food truck operator about how frequently they’ve seen large overnight parties and camping around the county.
Yet no “similarly situated individual” has been cited. That, Necci and Horlacher say, combined with the fact Neighbors is African-American, is enough to shift the burden to the county to prove a valid exercise of prosecutorial discretion not based on race.
Nicholas Sigmund, the Land Use and Resource Management Department’s senior zoning officer, said race played no role in the citations. He said he merely responded on June 22 to a complaint — he would not identify who complained — about noise and activity at Neighbors’ property and told the Family Fest organizers they were in violation, then cited Neighbors for each day the violations continued.
Sigmund agreed that, theoretically, a homeowner could be cited for sleeping out in a tent in his own yard but questioned the relevance.
“Theoretically, you can be ticketed for driving 56 mph in a 55 zone, but it’s a lot more likely if you’re going 100 mph.”
Necci said Neighbors told residents around the tree farm, a local judge and the sheriff’s office about the planned festival and received no objections or warnings that what he planned was illegal.
“The evidence we’ve presented clearly demonstrates that LURM and Walworth County have no problem giving every other white family in the county a free pass, but will immediately cite Mr. Neighbors despite any goodwill effort on his part.”
In addition to the tree farm, Neighbors owns a couple of coffee shops and a seal-coating business, Necci said.
“He’s a rule follower. He’s about the last guy on earth to blame anything on racism, but this was too obvious to ignore,” Necci said.
He said when his request for public records of all the citations for the same violations came back empty, “We were shocked, like ‘you gotta be kidding me.’”
Sigmund said his office just wasn’t made aware of some of the other large weekend parties with tents and campers Necci’s brief mentions, and that others were in cities or villages outside the zoning office’s jurisdiction.
Necci was appointed district attorney in 2012 and ran unsuccessfully for judge in 2016. Now he’s practicing personal injury law from offices in Elkhorn and Tennessee. His partner, Horlacher, was an assistant prosecutor for Necci and now serves in the state Assembly and practices law in Elkhorn.
They could wind up representing Neighbors in a bigger case than his zoning citations. In October, they filed a notice of claim with the county — a legal prerequisite to suing government — seeking $3.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages for racial discrimination. The county’s board denied the claim in December.