County fees, legal foes stirred Raceway officials to rethink music festival

When Steve Page announced that the Sonoma Raceway would not be pursuing its ambitious plans for a multi-day rock festival – along with the other use permit variances it announced last year – he was forthright about the reason: it was too expensive and lengthy a process to go through.

“The county was still a month away from even starting the environmental impact report,” he told the Index-Tribune, “and from there the costs just begin to skyrocket to a level that made the business opportunity no longer a viable one.”

“I’m disappointed that the Raceway withdrew their request. I have a lot of respect for Steve Page,” said Tennis Wick, the head of the county’s Permit and Resource Management Department – the office any project goes to apply for a permit, large or small. And the application for the Sonoma Raceway rock concert was a big one.

“It’s a big property to get in compliance with the environmental impact act,” said Wick, explaining that his department uses “diligence and caution” in evaluating and processing applications of that scale.

“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,” Page said last week, “instead of handing it over to the planning department of Sonoma County.”

Wick pointed out that the money – which he agreed sounded about right, given the scale of the proposal – was a state requirement for all such EIR studies. “The applicant is responsible for paying staff for major projects, like other agencies in the state we’re pay-as-you-go,” he said.

But it’s not the whole cost: by law the applicant pays 80 percent, and 20 percent comes out of the general fund, which is already allocated to the department. Which means the total cost for the Raceway use permit process was estimated at $720,000.

Add this to the money Sonoma Raceway had already put toward the project – Page gave a figure of a quarter-million, of which Wick said the county had received only $50,000 in filing fees – the Raceway was looking at committing to a million-dollar process that would only increase over time.

How long the permitting process would be depends on the scale of the project, of course, but both Wick and Page agreed it would take more than a year.

Lurking the background, there were at least two law firms poised to challenge the EIR, gathering information through public-records-act requests and tracking the application process. One of these Wick identified as representing the Lily family, who neighbor the raceway property. (The Lily family did not respond to a request for comment by presstime.) The other entity closely tracking the permit process was a “very prominent San Francisco law firm,” ?said Wick, though he didn’t know who they represented.

So even at the release of the EIR, the obstacles remaining for the project were probably just beginning. “When you have to spend three to four years and upwards of probably two million just to get it to the board of supervisors, the economics go south,” said Page. “You don’t know if the opportunity will be as viable when that time goes by.”

Page tried to present a positive picture of the Raceway’s decision. “We’re right in the teeth of our event season; once we get through things this summer we may take a look at some of the other smaller items in that application.”

“I hope they can come back to us in some form in the future,” said Wick. “There were elements of it that we could support, and others we could mitigate – like a trail link for Tolay Lake Regional Park, something we were always hoping to see.”

“If there is a viable, cost-effective way to adjust those, we may take another look at it.”

One thing they probably won’t be looking at is Racetrack Rock.