ROTHBURY — While the item wasn’t on the agenda, Rothbury residents made their presence known Tuesday evening at the village council’s monthly meeting to protest the decision by Electric Forest to modify its neighborhood wristband program.
Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns and operates Electric Forest, announced in March that Rothbury residents who live in EF’s footprint would no longer receive complimentary daily passes to the festival, set for June 20-23 this year. Instead, neighbors can sign up online for passes to the Sunday of the festival, with the option to purchase discounted passes to the entire event.
The public comment period of Tuesday’s meeting revolved mostly around that announcement, with several speakers expressing displeasure with the move. One commenter said local residents view the passes as “compensation” for the interruption to their daily routine caused by festival traffic, adding the hope that such compensation could be achieved other ways, such as a strict ban on noise beyond a certain hour, with fines going to affected residents.
Trustee Mike Harris, who ran the meeting in the absence of president Vern Talmadge while the latter was in a training program, read a statement on behalf of the council addressing the concerns. The public commenters noted the proximity of the wristband announcement to January’s mass-gathering permit renewal that enables Electric Forest to operate, though Harris’ statement said the two items were unrelated and that the council was as taken by surprise as residents were by the change to the program.
This did little to quiet the discontent among meeting attendees, a couple of whom noted that the meeting’s agenda also mentioned a potential ordinance change that would permit the council to appoint the treasurer and the clerk rather than them being elected positions. The citizens felt the change, which was not voted on Tuesday as an amended ordinance was not yet ready to present, was an attempt to head off electoral repercussions for the Electric Forest permit renewal and wristband change.
As for the regularly scheduled meeting items, the council continued to discuss the possibility of providing trash service to local residents through Kuerth’s Disposal of Twin Lake. Kuerth’s co-owner Jackie Kunnen was in attendance to take questions from the council about some particulars, and the council appeared receptive to what they heard. No firm date was set for service to begin, but all signs point to it doing so. Kunnen said the company has a list of Rothbury residents it currently serves, and if the village wanted to begin service prior to the beginning of the third quarter, it would issue prorated refunds to those who previously paid for second-quarter services.
The council also updated residents on the Czarny Park grant request, which the village is pursuing in order to facilitate park upgrades. The applications were sent in for both the Recreation Passport grant and the DNR’s Trust Fund grant, with the latter being a larger grant that would help fund more substantive upgrades. The village will hear back about potential tweaks to its application by September, with a final decision set for December.
