By Thomas K. Pendergast

Starting next year, another weekend of August concerts will be held at the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park following the Outside Lands Music Festival if the San Francisco Board of Supervisors green-lights the proposal in September. 

The Budget Committee will consider the plan on Sept. 6. If approved, it is expected to go before the full Board on Sept. 12. 

This comes after a deal was announced by District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan, responding to resistance from neighbors on both sides of the park to yet more concerts hosted by Another Planet Entertainment (APE).

This additional concert series will be greatly scaled down to just one stage on the Polo Field and held over two or possibly three nights of the weekend after the Outside Lands Music Festival. 

As part of the deal, APE will fund free Muni rides to and from the concert, plus it will sponsor three free concerts downtown at Civic Center Plaza, Union Square and the Embarcadero in an effort to help businesses still struggling to recover from the pandemic’s economic fallout.

They have also agreed to increase community benefit funding for neighborhood programs in the Richmond and Sunset districts. 

City officials say APE currently provides $25,000 annually to both districts and will contribute another $10,000 per neighborhood as part of the deal. 

“With this initial agreement, Rec. and Park has committed to continuing the outreach to our community, to ensure their concerns are heard, while still bringing the benefits to the Richmond and the entire City,” Chan said in a press release. “I appreciate Another Planet Entertainment’s willingness to come to the table and recognize the communities I represent. Our conversations have led to prioritize community input in this process, to ensure prevailing wages for all workers, and to concrete initiatives for downtown revitalization.”

District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio, who represents a large part of the Sunset District, expressed his approval of the plan.

“I support additional ticketed concerts following Outside Lands in Golden Gate Park because they will pay for the free concerts downtown, keep our parks from facing a deficit, and offer more community benefits for Sunset residents,” Engardio said. “We need more joy in San Francisco as we work to address the serious issues facing our City. I’m grateful that Another Planet Entertainment agreed to everything I asked for to help our City.”

“We are thrilled that supervisors will hear the proposal to bring music to our city’s parks and plazas,” said San Francisco Recreation and Park Department General Manager Phil Ginsburg. “This is a win-win proposal – allowing our department to continue to maintain our green spaces and offer robust programming while offering residents and visitors the kind of world-class entertainment APE provides.” 

At a community meeting on July 20, George Ridgely, manager of permits and reservations for Rec. and Park, said the additional concerts would go from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. and be “very different” than the Outside Lands festival in that each show would be a single headliner with supporting acts. 

Attendance would be limited to 65,000 per day, compared to 75,000 per day for the Outside Lands festival.

“It’s a unique opportunity to be able to piggyback on the festival and the infrastructure from the festival to have the concert on the subsequent weekend,” Ridgely said. “A lot of the impact to the park, the impact to the users, is two weeks of load-in before the festival. If all of that were to be loaded out and have to be loaded back in at a different time of year you would be looking at a much larger impact.”

He said there will be a minimum fee guarantee of $1.4 million for a two-day event and an additional $700,000 if it’s a three-day event. 

“So up to $2.1 million for Rec. and Park, and then there’s additional possible fees. The event organizer would pay the department the higher of either the minimum (fee guarantee), or 5% of net revenue from ticket sales for the event (whichever is higher).”

“And those fees will increase each year with a cost-of-living increase.”

All Rec. and Park staffing expenses, like park rangers and gardeners, etc., will be reimbursed at 100% cost recovery. 

Allen Scott, APE president of concerts and festivals, said the transportation plan will encourage people to take alternate means of transportation, like shuttle buses, Muni buses and bicycles, with designated Lyft and Uber drop-off and pickup areas, and they will have PCOs (parking control officers) and SFPD in neighborhoods along with tow trucks to deal with blocked driveways.

But not everyone at the meeting was happy about the additional concerts.

“I’m totally against this. It’s the noise, it’s the traffic, it’s the trash; it’s people peeing on my garage door,” said local Devorah Joseph. “You don’t need to do this. You’re disturbing the animals. You’re disturbing us.

“This park was built for the citizens of San Francisco and for a month, now possibly more, you’re taking it away from us. That’s not right. And what do you give us back? It’s a pittance. Let another neighborhood bear the burden that we’ve been bearing for 15 years.” 

“It’s just not fair to the public or to the residents in the Richmond and the Sunset, like they’re prisoners in their own house,” said Richard Rothman, also a local resident. “They can’t drive their cars; this is going to be three weekends in a row.”

Suzie Ferras, president of the Balboa Village Merchants Association (BVMA) said she asked BVMA members what they thought, and the response was a “mixed bag.”

“Some merchants are like ‘we don’t need another weekend.’ And I think the feeling was more just the parking, the excessive crowds and things like that,” Ferras said.

“But then on the other hand there are merchants that are like ‘that’s one of our best weekends. We stay open late. We’re packed.’ It really does impact a lot of our merchants positively.”

Cynthia Huie, president of the Clement Street Merchants Association said she also got feedback from their members. 

“All the responses that we’ve gotten have been very positive. Having more people discover the Richmond has been many of the business’s goals,” Huie said. “They also really enjoy being discovered by people who are visiting, by people who maybe have never thought about coming into the Richmond before. I think this is an opportunity for many of them to be on the map a little differently than they generally are in their daily lives.”

Christian Routzen, owner of San Franpsycho on Ninth Avenue who also sits on the board of the Inner Sunset Merchants Association, said he’s been going to Outside Lands the last 14 of its 15 years. 

“You can see that when (APE) first came in there was probably a lot of impact to the park; there was probably a lot of impact to the streets,” Routzen said. “I’ve seen Outside Lands really make an effort for comments like these … for the people who do have concerns. 

“They’re creative folks. I’ve been working with them for a long time. They may really figure out this traffic situation with some buses. Be a little patient. At the same time, the impacts for the City are really great and for us as a small business of course,” he said. 

On Aug. 9, the Planning Association for the Richmond (PAR) will host a community meeting at 6 p.m. at the Golden Gate Park Senior Center, 6101 Fulton St. Representatives from District 1, Rec. and Park and APE will be present for questions and community concerns.