Some downtown Miami residents are asking why the music during the Ultra Music Festival raged longer than expected last weekend.
The festival’s beat of electronic dance music lasted longer on Saturday night than on Friday night, when organizers had to end it early because of stormy weather.
In a license agreement between the City of Miami, by and through the Bayfront Park Management Trust (BPMT), and Event Entertainment Group, INC., operating hours had a midnight end on Saturday and a 10 p.m. end on Sunday, adding that, “Licensee shall pay a time overage fee of $1,000 to the Trust for ever single minute, or a fraction thereof, if the Event continues behind the time designated each Event day.”
The agreement adds that “the hours described herein are firm unless an amendment thereto is mutually agreed upon by the Parties.”
In a letter to the mayor and commissioners Monday, the Downtown Neighbors Alliance (DNA) Board of Directors and DNA President James Torres stated that they are “deeply concerned and frustrated by the way the Ultra Music Festival allowed performances to continue on both Saturday and Sunday past the publicly posted scheduled end times.”
Miami’s City Attorney’s Office on Monday explained that the “executive director of BPMT authorized Ultra Music Festival an extension on Saturday night’s event to 12:45 a.m.” Torres, however, stated that on Saturday “festival organizers allowed the event to further continue until at least 1:02 a.m.”
A viewer sent Local 10 an Ultra Instagram post of a Day 3 Sunday schedule with three acts starting at and after 10 p.m.
Organizers say the livestream schedule is a delayed stream. On Monday, Torres told the mayor and commissioners and that festival organizers, without notifying the DNA, also decided to continue the festival until at least 10:27 p.m., nearly a half hour past the scheduled closing of the festival at 10 p.m. Sunday.
Torres added in the letter that “such actions not only disregard the publicly posted commitments made to our community, but also demonstrate a lack of respect for the well-being of our neighbors. We demand answers from both the Ultra organizers and the City of Miami. We respectfully ask you to compel the city manager, the city’s code compliance director, as well as the organizers of the Ultra Music Festival, to make a public accounting at the next city commission meeting, as to how the decision to extend the festival was approved, and why no one in the community was notified.”
According to Ray Martinez, Ultra Music Festival’s Chief of Security, the festival’s sound monitoring engineers say that on Saturday the music ended at 1 a.m. and on Sunday night, the music ended at 10:10 p.m.
“In our view, the event is over when the music ends. Of course, 50,000 plus people are not going to disappear in a second, so there is a process of getting them out safely and securely,” he said.
The retired Miami Beach police chief also thanked police and fire rescue with working with festival organizers swiftly on Friday night to assist in executing a plan to safely evacuate tens of thousands of attendees, “without any injuries,” as weather conditions worsened.
“We had a severe weather system coming our way. At a certain point, we had to make a decision in consideration of public safety. We made the decision to stop the show and evacuate the site,” he said.
They started the evacuation, he said, around 8:40 p.m. and “staggered it” in order to mitigate against injuries.
“So we started shutting down stage by stage, every minute basically, shut down another stage,” ending with the main stage that was shut down right around 9 p.m., Martinez said.
The festival was contractually authorized to operate until midnight Friday, which meant festival organizers lost three hours on Friday and then “on Saturday, because the condition of the site with all the rain and weather that we had, we were not able to open until 4 p.m. when we should have opened an noon -- so we lost seven hours,” Martinez said.
“When we shut the show down on Friday, we reached out to the Bayfront Management Trust and asked if there is any consideration for allowing us to go longer Saturday. There was a lot of discussion back and forth and it was approved for us to go to 12:45 a.m.,” he said. “We went a little over (until 1 a.m. Saturday, per the festival’s sound monitoring engineers), a few minutes over and the same thing happened on Sunday -- again, it was just a few minutes. That is within the agreement. There are stipulations for that on how that is handled by the Trust, so technically, we did not violate the agreement, but we did go over, just by minutes.”
The license agreement has a “time overage fee” of $1,000 to the Trust for “every single minute, or a fraction thereof if the Event continues beyond the time designated each Even day.” It is unknown if Bayfront Park Management Trust has billed Ultra for the minutes exceeded last weekend.
Martinez also addressed the frustration some downtown Miami residents expressed, saying that this is Ultra’s 24th year and 22nd year in Miami.
“We’ve worked very closely with the Downtown Neighbors Alliance (DNA) the last three years. We have come together to try and mitigate our impact on the residents. I understand their concern and I get it. At the end of the day, this was a one-off, if you will, because of the weather event that came through here,” Martinez said.
He said they plan to sit down with the DNA to discuss the events of last weekend “and how to handle this moving forward. We are setting up the dates now to do that.”
On Monday, downtown Miami resident and New York attorney Kristen Browde sent an email to commissioners reminding them that Ultra’s operating hours and sound levels “were carefully negotiated with the residents of downtown. The decision to allow Ultra to overrun its negotiated hours was not just a slap int he face of the residents, it produced economic injury to the businesses that counted on the thousands of Ultra fans pouring out of the park and into their businesses.”
She also added how the DNA thinks the “District 2 Commissioner should be running the Trust rather than someone who doesn’t live here.”
Against the backdrop of her downtown Miami balcony, Browde observed the festival’s footprint and the subsequent breakdown of its stages, alluding to mounting frustration among residents.
“I like EDM. We want people to be happy and prosperous, but we also have to get sleep. This is a neighborhood that has grown-up a lot,” said Browde. “There are some 50,000 families who live in the sound lines of Ultra so we negotiate carefully to make sure they can have a great festival. We can enjoy it to, but the police officers, the airline pilots, the doctors and nurses who have to get up in the morning and have to get to work have to get their sleep so the parents who are trying to get cranky kids to get to bed, can get that done too.”
“Ray [Martinez] is a good guy,” added Browde. “The problem isn’t with the folks at Ultra. They made a request which the City of Miami should have never conceded to. That is where the problem lies. We understand it rained. I was going to Hamilton that night. I got drowned out like everyone else, but that doesn’t mean you go late. That’s part of living here, but not at one in the morning, and that is all that we are asking. That is all the residents want — to have that good relationship so the businesses thrive, the community thrives and we have a great place to live.”
Bayfront Park is located in District 2, but the current Bayfront Park Management Trust Chairman is District 3 Commissioner Joe Carollo.
“The Bayfront trust is run by people who have no responsibility to the neighborhood,” said Browde. “The District 3 Commissioner Joe Carollo is the head of the Bayfront trust instead of Damian Pardo, our commissioner. That is something that ought to change.”
“They don’t feel accountable to us. They don’t think about us when they make decision. They think about how much money can we bring into the park and that’s important, how much money they bring into the park, but it is also important that the community see this as it is reflective of what the community needs, and right now, that is not happening. That is why people are understanding but upset and we are not going to let that happen again next year,” she added.
In a statement Monday night, District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo told Local 10 News that “the decision to extend the festival on Sunday past 10 p.m. was made between the Bayfront Park Trust and Ultra ... neither decision included the City of Miami administration or the District 2 Commission Office … given the choice, we WOULD NOT have accepted an extension either day.”
On Tuesday evening, the DNA Board of Directors responded to Pardo statement, in part, which you can read here:
“We have read Commissioner Pardo’s statement and encourage him and his office to take a more active role on this matter, beyond deflecting blame to others. We feel that his remarks may not fully capture the complexity of the situation.”
VIEW THE LICENSE AGREEMENT BELOW: