‘Pretty bummed’: Vancouver promoter says city flip-flopped on music festival

A major concert and event promoter is accusing Vancouver of living up to its “no fun city” reputation after parks staff called off a planned major music festival just months before its scheduled date.

Alvaro Prol, founder and co-owner of Blueprint, had partnered with Live Nation to host a two-day electronic music event called Foundation at East Vancouver’s New Brighton Park on the Victoria Day long weekend.

The 19+ event would have served alcohol and seen up to 10,000 attendees per day.

As first reported by Postmedia, Prol said he’d been in talks with parks staff about using the space for more than a year and had secured a green light from the city’s elected park board in January.

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But a month later, Prol said parks staff reversed the decision, saying there were problems with the plan that couldn’t be sorted out in time for the event to go ahead.

“I don’t know what these people thought, like, ‘Hey just call your friends and tell them it’s not happening anymore’ or something. It’s just not that easy for us once we are all committed,” he said.

“We are pretty bummed because we did a lot of great work.”

Prol said Blueprint began talks with parks staff shortly after the Vancouver Park Board lifted a moratorium on new commercial events in park spaces in December 2022.

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According to Prol, it was parks staff who had initially suggested New Brighton Park as a venue.

Blueprint met with staff several times throughout 2023, providing information and documentation as the proposal developed, he said.

“We were like, now is the time, the city is open for business, they want creators to come in and they want to put some energy into these parks,” he said.

In January 2024, parks staff formally recommended the proposal in a report to the elected board, which described New Brighton Park as “surrounded by the PNE, Burrard Inlet, arterial roadways, and areas with industrial activity,” and “an ideal site for hosting larger scale music primary events that may not be suitable in locations with a high concentration of residents.”

The board approved the concept, at which point it was passed back to staff to hammer out “the necessary detailed event plans” for final approval that was ultimately denied.

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim, who campaigned on opening the city’s parks to more events and activities, deferred questions to the Vancouver Park Board.

But he insisted Vancouver is more than its “no fun city” reputation.

“I do think there are pockets, a lot of pockets of fun and a lot of pockets of culture,” he said.

The park board, for its part, described the situation as unfortunate.

“The key next steps that happen after board approval is we get into stakeholder engagement, we work with our departments in the city as well, to ensure there is safety plans, transportation plans, any knock-on impacts from the plan are able to be mitigated,” park board general manager Steve Jackson told Global News in an interview.

“While we were hopeful the event could be hosted, once we got into the details we quickly realized it wasn’t going to be possible, at least not in the timeframe we had.”

Jackson cited noise, along with concerns from the port and emergency services as ultimately scuttling the event.

He said part of the problem was that New Brighton Park had not previously been used for a major event, unlike Jericho or Stanley Park.

Prol said all of those issues were known when his company started talking with the city.

If they were serious enough to prevent the event from happening, the city should have said so from the get-go, he said, not months before it was scheduled to happen.

“You have this whole thing cooked, ready to go, a lot of money invested to be able to create this lineup of artists,” he said. “I am like, why are you telling us this a year later?”

“I don’t know how they run their operation there, but I just think for Vancouver — and it’s not just them — sometimes it’s just easier to say ‘No,'” he added.

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Prol compared his experience with the city to working with the City of Surrey, where his company has hosted the FVDED in the Park concert series for nearly a decade.

Surrey staff, he said, were “very welcoming” and were willing to work with Blueprint to tweak any concerns that came up in order to ensure the event was a success.

“They played ball and they worked with us, and whatever we need to fix we fix collectively every year.”

In the end, Blueprint was able to work out a deal with the PNE to host the festival on the same May long weekend dates, meaning the money already invested in organization, planning and artists won’t be lost.

He said Blueprint hopes to announce details of that event as early as this weekend.

“This is our careers and livelihood,” he said.

“Mine, people in production, suppliers, artists, all of us work hard for these moments and they are so hard to produce. So hard.”