The Flex Express Tour, headlined by award-winning DJ Skrillex, will not be making a stop in St. Albert after all.
It was announced in early May that the electronic music festival was to play Kinsmen Park in St. Albert on July 20, but approval from the city was not in place when tickets went on sale.
Now, St. Albert’s administration has decided not to approve the required permits, due to lack of security, and that’s left many customers, who’ve already bought tickets to the show, wondering what will happen.
Online, someone with the Twitter handle @Future_Roots says “@Skrillex show in #StAlbert cancelled! So this means refunds for all purchased tix??”
“The trump card on this one, or the big issue, was policing resources,” says acting City Manager Chris Jardine.
“And the timeframe on it prevented us from putting together the resources externally that we would have had to bring in.”
However, the concert’s promoter, Dave Johnston, says he’s worked on larger projects in less time and pulled them off successfully.
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Even though security was said to be the main reason for the cancellation, Johnston believes electronic music is viewed unfairly.
“It’s just part of the ongoing cycle of something new coming along and people not knowing what to do with it,” he says.
“This isn’t a rave. This is not us trying to wave a bunch of glow sticks around and ask kids to do, you know, bad things. This is a concert; this is a festival event celebrating a diverse range of music and new rising artists.”
Johnston thinks hosting this tour would have been good for the city.
“It presented a really unique opportunity to bring something new and to do business with St. Albert. It’s really sad that we aren’t going to be able to do that now.”
He says the organizers had an action plan for the city’s concerns, but the city didn’t want to hear about it and denied the permit.
“It really felt that doors were being closed when we wanted dialogue,” Johnston says.
Councillor Cathy Heron would consider hosting such an event when the city has the resources to handle it properly.
“There’s also support from the community in general to make St. Albert a highlight or destination for that kind of concert, but maybe when we’re ready we would entertain that idea.”
Jardine says city administration had a number of meetings and communication with event organizers. He says it was an issue of not being ready to host an event of this size.
“This would have been the most significant concert that the city of St. Albert would ever have hosted here, so obviously something we weren’t used to.”
Heron agrees. “The city did not have the capacity, police wise, ambulance wise, and fire so for security reasons, the decision was made that St. Albert is not able to hold a concert for ten thousand kids.”
Now organizers are looking to find a solution and the tour will now be stopping in Edmonton with a venue to be determined later this week.
“Not an ideal situation but the show has to go on,” Johnston says.
With Files from Fletcher Kent.
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