Raceway faces the music, drops concert plans

Plans for the multi-day rock concert event at the Sonoma Raceway that were announced just a year ago have been cancelled, along with all other aspects of the revised use permit the facility was applying for.

Steve Page, the president and general manager of Sonoma Raceway, announced on Thursday that the Raceway was withdrawing its request to modify the facility’s use permit – and the planned music event that sparked the application would not be happening after all.

Page said the decision was reached at the end of business on Wednesday, when they had already prepared two checks totaling over half a million dollars that they had to submit to the county planning department to continue the application process.

“I looked out the window and thought about all the different ways we could spend $600,000 to make this a better facility for our fans,” he said. “That’s when things crystalized for us that we were not headed down a good road.”

The money was due to the county to get the Environmental Impact Report started, and to pay for the county staff time to administer it. “We’re already a quarter million dollars into this,” Page said. “The schedule kept pushing farther out, and the $600,000 we would hand them now would be just the tip of the iceberg.”

Page estimated it would take at least $2 million and three or four years just to get the proposal before the Board of Supervisors. “We went through this process in the late ’90s to get the entitlements to remodel this facility. That was a long frustrating process at the time, and I can only say that in the intervening 15 years it’s only gotten worse.”

Ironically, the other five racetracks in the Speedway group that Sonoma is a part of are still pursuing the rock concert plan, proposed by Page to the group in partnership with Napa-based Nitro-Fidelity - and are probably going to continue with their plans.

“None of other tracks have permit issues,” said Page. “If they wanted to do a concert, they could do it tomorrow.”