March 28, 2019 500 AM
MARFA, PRESIDIO COUNTY – The C3 Presents music festival will be required to seek a permit from Presidio County under the Texas Mass Gatherings Act. The festival is proposed to take place outside Marfa’s city limits in 2020, but the final decision on granting that permit will lie with Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara.
Without a permit, the law suggests C3 Presents won’t be allowed to move forward with promoting their planned event.
The Mass Gatherings Act applies to any gathering in Texas occurring outside of city limits, expecting more than 2,500 attendees, and lasting longer than five hours. The act is part of the Texas Health and Safety Code. C3 Presents’ proposed festival aims to host around 5,000 attendees, and is slated to take place over multiple days at the S. Gage Ranch north of town in the unincorporated county.
Even though C3 Presents also produces Austin City Limits (ACL), a Texas music festival that has grown to 450,000 attendees over two weekends each year, the company has not been required to seek this Texas Mass Gatherings permit previously, because as Austin City Limits’ name implies, the festival takes place inside a city, rather than in unincorporated county land.
The festival, geared toward “a sophisticated, culturally attune (sic) adult audience,” would likely be the first event in the county to require the permit, because other gatherings in Presidio County, like El Cosmico’s Trans-Pecos Festival of Music + Love, have not needed one. El Cosmico’s yearly event only topped 1,000 attendees last year, so it still falls well below the 2,500-person threshold the permit demands.
In the permit application, C3 Presents, a subsidiary of the multi-billion-dollar ticketing and promoting corporation Live Nation, will be required to provide financial statements, certified agreements for the land use, and information on performers. The organization must also supply explanations of steps taken to ensure sanitation and health, medical and nursing care, and traffic control during the event.
After submitting the application, the materials are handed over to the county health authority, the county fire marshal, and the sheriff. They will each assess the risks they believe are present, and the mitigation plans given to them in the application. After their investigations, they will submit a report to the judge. The judge may also order any additional investigations she deems necessary.
Judge Guevara will then schedule a hearing on the application. According to the Texas Mass Gatherings Act, those who provide reports will be available at the hearing to give testimony, and the county will invite C3 Presents and any person “who has an interest in whether the permit is granted or denied. At the hearing, any person may appear and testify for or against the permit.”
The act also outlines that the county judge must ultimately enter her findings, and grant or deny the permit based on the results of the investigations. The granting or rejecting of the permit by Judge Guevara may be appealed to the state district court by C3 or by any person affected by the permit.
Gary Mitchke, the Emergency Management Coordinator in the county, says he currently acts in the capacity of the county fire marshal. Because of that, he will have to review the C3 event application and make assessments on their fire safety plans. Although C3 says they will “employ fire personnel onsite to handle all issues,” Mitchke questions how C3 will truly mitigate fire risks.
“We kind of understand how things like that are in this part of the country, but I’m not so sure the people putting on the event understand how limited we are in resources, and even the ability of bringing in outside resources. Until we have a chance to sit down and talk about it, I really don’t know how I feel about the whole thing.” No one within the C3 Presents organization has reached out to Mitchke yet.
Speaking about the county’s resources, Mitchke said, “I’m just concerned that, not only just fire, but, the first response capabilities that we have in the county are pretty limited, and on a day-to-day basis we pretty much do all we can do with who we have when it comes to first responding for EMS, fire, and even law enforcement.”
Recent discussions at the county level have revealed how stretched thin Presidio County’s emergency resources are. This year the City of Presidio’s only two ambulances broke down simultaneously one day, which left the city without access to ambulance services for almost an hour. There have been multiple deaths reported in the county due to ambulances not being available because they were responding to another emergency call. In 2017, a woman choked to death in Presidio because EMS was already dispatched elsewhere, leaving only a police officer to respond.
During county discussions on airport improvements this year, Airport Director Chase Snodgrass highlighted that the Marfa airport still can’t provide life flights for life threatening trauma emergencies. Presidio’s life flight services increased survival outcomes dramatically, reducing trauma death rates from 30% to 1%, but Marfa’s airport does not have the resources or infrastructure to provide the service.
In its current state, the Marfa airport is also not fully equipped to handle fires. During discussions on Marfa fire safety earlier this year, Snodgrass explained, “The fire danger out there on that big plain is huge. When we have fires, we bring in aircrafts to fight them.”
In past fire emergencies, the forest service has based out of Fort Stockton because of available resources, even though the fires happen much closer to Marfa. Mitchke has previously stated he wants to build an area at the airport for response teams, because currently, there is not a good place to base the responders, or the holding tanks for water and retardant. The forest service did make a small helicopter base at the Marfa airport during wildfires in the Davis Mountains last year.
Referencing C3’s plans for a May event, a time with high fire risk, Mitchke said, “That time of the year is a big concern. Anything that aggravates that is an issue.”
Marfa Police Chief Steve Marquez says he was contacted by C3 last week, when they reached out to invite him to a meeting for public officials “sometime in April.” Marquez explained, “They were contacting officials of the city of Marfa, and then they brought up some issues about people that weren’t happy about them coming to Marfa.” The police chief said C3 was seeing photos of their employees posted on Instagram with messages that suggested ‘you’re not welcome here.’
But Marquez said, “There was nothing threatening that we found. It was basically just letting them know that they’re not wanted here, and just making statements about how they’re just not really being welcomed to Marfa. What alarmed them was that they were getting pictures of their faces.”
In addressing C3’s complaints to the Marfa Police Department, Marquez concluded, “Basically what happens on social media is there’s a freedom of speech, so as long as you’re not threatening someone on a page, or that they feel their lives are at immediate danger, it’s a very hard way to basically go after someone. If it’s posted on your own page, it has to take a lot more than that to basically get a judge or anyone to look into a case like that.”
Aside from the Instagram posts, Marquez indicated C3 is “supposed to be coming to Marfa and meeting with emergency management, and I guess that they’ve invited me to sit in on that. What they’re trying to get is myself, the emergency management team, Gary Mitchke, Sheriff Danny Dominguez, and the commissioners and city council.”
Sheriff Dominguez said that he was contacted on Tuesday by someone from the ranch who said he was interested in discussing with the Sheriff security about an upcoming event at the ranch. Dominguez informed the caller that he was out of town and would be in contact with that person when he returns to Mar-fa.
Aside from fire, public health, and public safety investigations, the judge may seek more studies before setting the hearing for the application. Though an environmental impact study is not required in the Texas Mass Gatherings Act, the judge is allowed to order an investigation into it.
Questions remain on how C3 Presents plans to remediate the fragile and diverse grasslands of west Texas, and who will perform the work of remediation. The Marfa grassland ecosystem is very different from the grass turf in Chicago’s Grant Park or Austin’s Zilker Park, where the company hosts two of their largest festivals.
Those parks are public and municipally owned, so the cities do the remediation work, and receive reimbursement for it from C3. In those cases, the cities must sod, reseed, and aerate the ground, because of soil compaction that hampers rain from being able to enter the ground.
C3’s remediation costs have varied over the years, but are often six figures in cost, and have reached nearly $1 million for a single festival in some cases. As their festivals in Chicago and Austin have expanded in duration and size over time, costs have grown. C3 is committed to leaving the land better than they found it, and park officials are usually satisfied with the remediation work.
According to Judge Guevara’s office, the Wednesday, April 3 County Commissioners Court agenda will have an item for “discuss with action on a resolution on crowds.” The commissioners are expected to discuss the Texas Mass Gatherings Act then.
The meeting will take place at the Presidio County Courthouse in Mar-fa, beginning at 9:30am, and the public is invited to attend.
