Letter to the Editor: Seven Peaks Between a Rock and a Hard Place

By now you’ve likely all seen the video clip of Chaffee County Commissioner Greg Felt laying into Live Nation representative, Jim Reid, during last Tuesday’s Board of County Commissioners meeting. “What the hell, Jim” was Felt’s exasperated response when he found out Live Nation had sold over 6,000 tickets to the Seven Peaks Music Festival, an event that has yet to be approved and an amount of tickets that far exceeds the current County Health Order.

But unless you sat through the entire eight-hour meeting, you may have missed a bigger issue for both Live Nation and Bonfire, the applicant for “Meet Me at the Creek”, a proposed 5,000-person event in late September. The issue at hand is a little-known State law (or statute) that sets limits on noise levels. Rather than bore you with the details, here is the crux of it: both events are proposed for The Meadows, located on the west edge of Buena Vista. In residential zones such as the Meadows, noise levels are limited to protect the serenity of the area and quality of life and health of residents.

The Meadows is zoned residential; there are over 1,100 homes* within 1 mile of where the Seven Peaks main stage sits. These are families that moved here, some long ago, for the peace, quiet, and tranquility afforded by the small community of Buena Vista. Major concert venues are rarely zoned residential. That is for a good reason.

But since Vertex in 2016, to the last Seven Peaks in 2019, massive music festivals on this property have disturbed that quality of life and, apparently violated the law. It’s only the luck of the County and the concert promoters that they’ve gotten away without consequence. Of course, many BV residents oppose these events, from Vertex, when there were over 800 signatures on a petition to prevent that event, until this week, when the majority of the 90 citizens logged in to the Commissioners meeting opposed Seven Peaks.

This year, even if the Commissioners don’t listen to their constituents, they appear unwilling to stray from the state statute, knowing that could make them complicit in violating state law. Tuesday’s meeting ended without a clear decision and a continuance to Wednesday, June 30th.

If you are a gambler, good money is on Live Nation (a $19 Billion company) and millionaire landowner, Jed Selby, to find a potential loophole in the law. The most likely approach is to find a bogus nonprofit to partner with and claim a nonprofit exemption under state law. It appears this may be what Live Nation did in 2019. It seems they gave a measly $5,000 to a nonprofit, of which only $140 was ever distributed to a charity.

You don’t have to be an attorney to surmise that allowing a for-profit corporation to claim a nonprofit exemption by simply contributing a small fraction of their profit to a charity is completely against the intent of the State statute. And to say nothing of the moral question of whether allowing painfully loud music until 1:00 a.m. in a residential neighborhood is the right thing for our elected officials to allow.

Tune in Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. for more drama and excitement and to show your support for the protection of our valley’s serenity and quality of life.

Nathan Jones

Buena Vista

*The 1,100 number comes from a GIS calculation using a dataset of mapped buildings in Chaffee County and buffering the stage by 1 mile then running the intersect of those. While its well over 1,100, I assume some mapped buildings are not in-fact homes.