City hall rejected special event planned for New Brighton park, citing "neighbourhood sound impacts, port/marine terminal access, and potential harm to environmentally sensitive areas."
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The head of one of Western Canada’s top live entertainment companies is blasting the City of Vancouver, after a planned two-day outdoor music festival, which had received preliminary approval from the elected park board, was shot down by staff.
“It’s ‘No-Fun City strikes again. That’s the headline,” said Alvaro Prol, founder and co-owner of Blueprint. “How can No-Fun City still exist, when we’ve been talking about it for decades and decades?”
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Vancouver staff recently informed event organizers Blueprint and Live Nation Canada that the city would not issue a permit for a planned outdoor electronic dance music concert, which was expected to bring as many as 20,000 partiers to East Vancouver’s New Brighton Park over two days this May long weekend.
The event, called Foundation 9.0, made headlines in January when Vancouver’s park board gave it the green light.
Prol said he had not intended to go public with his experience, as his company works closely with the City of Vancouver, and has for decades, on a number of venues and events. But after Postmedia News contacted Prol to ask about a recently disclosed city memo regarding the event’s rejection, he shared his story.
The memo, which was dated Feb. 20 and publicly disclosed recently, said that although the elected park board commissioners gave the event preliminary approval at the public meeting in January — based on staff’s recommendations — further review had identified concerns including “neighbourhood sound impacts, port/marine terminal access, and potential harm to environmentally sensitive areas.”
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Blueprint, which employs 700 people and has been hosting events in Vancouver for more than 25 years, had spent years talking to the city about hosting outdoor concerts, Prol said, and in February 2023, park board staff suggested New Brighton Park, in Vancouver’s northeast corner, could be the right location.
Just two months earlier, Vancouver’s park board commissioners, in one of their first major decisions after being inaugurated in the last civic election, voted to lift a moratorium on planning and approving new large-scale special events in parks. The moratorium on any new “commercial initiatives” had been in place since 2019.
Promoting more festivals, fun, and revenue generation opportunities was a major piece of the election campaign of ABC Vancouver, the civic party that saw majorities elected to both park board and city council in fall 2022.
Park board staff described New Brighton’s location, “largely surrounded by the PNE, Burrard Inlet, arterial roadways, and areas with industrial activity,” as “an ideal site for hosting larger scale music-primary events that may not be suitable in locations with a high concentration of residents,” in the report presented to the elected park board commissioners in January, recommending the event’s approval.
“If they had said to me in February (2023): ‘No, that park’s not going to work because of the port,’ or whatever, I’d be like: ‘OK, cool.'” Prol said. “If it was a non-starter, it would have been really nice if they had not wasted our time.”
Since that February 2023 meeting, Blueprint had invested thousands of hours and a significant amount of money on this event, Prol said.
“They just decided to say: ‘There’s not enough time now to be able to get this approved.’ I’m like: ‘We’ve been working on this for a year, I’m not sure how much time you need. When I do this in Surrey, it takes me two weeks to do that,'” said Prol.
Blueprint has hosted FVDED in the Park, a two-day outdoor electronic music festival, in Surrey’s Holland Park since 2015. Dealing with Surrey city hall, is a markedly different experience than Vancouver, Prol said.
“In Surrey, they’re open for business. They know they have young culture, they know they want to bring events there, and they work hard.”
Asked about Foundation’s permit denial, the park board sent an emailed statement saying: “Issuing a permit is dependent on being able to overcome various operational requirements. While the Foundation 9.0 special event at New Brighton Park received preliminary approval in January 2024 by the park board, after further review, staff at the Vancouver park board were not in a position to approve a permit due to operational challenges.”
Foundation’s approval in January 2024, by the elected park board commissioners, was only part of the permitting process, says the newly released memo from park board general manager Steve Jackson to the board’s elected commissioners. The park board’s process for approving major events requires three steps: preliminary review by the city’s cross-departmental review, followed by the park board commissioner’s approval to proceed with the final stage, which entails more detailed planning and engagement before final approval is given.
Apparently, during that planning and engagement process in recent weeks, park board staff identified these insurmountable concerns.
While this experience was “a bummer,” Prol said, there is a “silver lining” from his point of view. After the park board’s rejection, Prol said he worked with the PNE to hold the Foundation event there.
PNE management has been “incredible” to work with, Prol said, and they have a plan in place to manage noise affects the neighbourhood.
Details about that event have not been released yet, but Prol said he hopes to make an announcement soon.
“To be a promoter, you have to be a little bit crazy,” Prol said. “We do it because we love it. I love this city, and I’ve been fighting to make it fun … We do the best we can under the circumstances … But we know we have so much more we could do, if they’d just allow us.”
dfumano@postmedia.com
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