“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.”
– W. C. Fields
The news last week that Sonoma Raceway had abandoned plans to launch a four-day music festival at its Sears Point racetrack was an even bigger shock than when 20-year-old Trevor Bayne won the 2011 Daytona 500 in just his second Sprint Cup race ever.
In fact, Sonoma Raceway seemed to have opened and shut the door on the festival proposal faster than it took me to Google for “biggest shocks in racing history” to find the aforementioned analogy.
Raceway president and GM Steve Page cited the mounting costs of changing the County issued use permit for the arena – from its current racing-related-only events to a more general large-venue use permit – which would have allowed for the proposed concerts, among other non-motorized events.
While Sonoma Raceway, situated in as near a remote-from-residential area as one can be found in the Sonoma-Marin area, is in about as ideal a place as any big-time rock festival around here could be, raceway officials knew they’d face stiff legal challenges to the environmental impact report they’d be required to present – a court fight that could find the use permit held in check for years, while legal fees piled faster than Bill Elliott’s 212.8 mph qualifying round at Talladega in 1987 (ah, thanks again, Google).
How’d they know they’d face a “battle of the bands” over the EIR? Because that’s what people around here do when a big proposal comes, literally, to their back yard - they suddenly become 21st century Rachel Carsons blowing the whistle on their personal “DDTs” of increased traffic and deafening cacophony. And the time and money it takes to defend the proposals often results in less a “Silent Spring” than a silenced use permit.
If there’s any doubt to this thinking consider: The exact tactic stopped George Lucas from building his dream digital production studio on remote ranchland in Lucas Valley. The guy’s worth $5 billion, and even he didn’t want to waste the time and money in a legal tete-a-tete with a handful of homeowner-association hardliners from a neighboring subdivision. If you think every land-use attorney from Marin to the Dagobah system didn’t take notice, I’ve got a rock-solid EIR attesting to the minimal impacts of noise and traffic upon the Highway 37 wetlands for sale.
Still, this isn’t to imply Sonoma Raceway didn’t make the right decision in surrendering the, er, stage. In fact, it would have been all-too-easy for raceway officials to have gotten caught up in the imagined glamor of producing a major music event along the lines of Outside Lands or the Coachella Valley fest, and simply stormed down the path with few thoughts to the future beyond, “Maybe we’ll get Jack White!”
As a cautionary tale, Sonoma Raceway folk may have recalled the 2010 effort by a group of San Rafael historians to launch Marin Rocks, a museum/performance space paean to the 415 area code’s legacy as a bedroom community for a bunch of famous musicians. Without a lot of foresight as to whether it was a feasible idea, the star-struck board of the Marin History Museum blew millions of dollars before it pulled the plug on its ill-advised foray into the musical entertainment industry. When the dust-in-the-wind finally settled, multiple staff had lost their jobs in desperate cost-cutting moves, and the executive director was replaced.
But they did get to meet Metallica, so at least it wasn’t an entire waste of time and money.
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