“It’s a shock, and it makes our permit applications feel more nerve-wracking and stressful,” says Glenn Schonewille, co-owner of festival ZeeZout, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. “When you see what happened, you get the feeling it could happen to anyone.”
On Saturday, May 8, festival organizer Loveland was told two hours before the gates were due to open that the City of Amsterdam had revoked the permit for Music On at sportpark Middenmeer in Oost. A tent near the main stage had received a negative assessment from the Omgevingsdienst Noordzeekanaalgebied, the regional environmental authority. Mayor Femke Halsema then decided the festival could not go ahead.
Critical review
An investigation by Het Parool found that in mid-March, Loveland had informed the Oost district that it wanted to use a different tent than originally planned. The district passed that information to the environmental authority. On Tuesday, May 6, the authority told the district it was advising against the tent that had by then already been erected, citing missing structural data and insufficient time to produce new calculations. Loveland took additional measures in an attempt to get the tent approved, but in the end those measures were not enough for Halsema, who said she felt backed into a corner at the last minute.
Schonewille says the Music On cancellation has also put his own team on edge. “You go back through everything to check whether you’ve done it all right and whether there are any loose ends. We’ve been critically reviewing our entire permit process and all the deadlines, for example.”
Programmer Bart Elshof of WestWeelde, the venue formerly known as Westerunie, spent last week double-checking all his permits too. “We need to have everything in order for Pride by Monday, so I went back and looked carefully.”
Unnecessary pressure
Elshof has been handling permit applications for WestWeelde for years and thinks the City could show a little more trust. “We can’t do things on an enormous scale here, so our permits are often the same as before. And yet every relevant department and agency has to review them all over again each time. It creates unnecessary workload for organizers and for a lot of departments within the City. There should be a points-based system so organizers with a good track record don’t have to redo everything from scratch every single time.”
Industry body Evenementen Vereniging Amsterdam (EVA) says in a statement that safety always comes first – and that safety is best served by clear, consistent and predictable rules and assessments. “Organizers have long experienced how difficult the safety advisory process for structures at events can be, and how it varies from environmental authority to environmental authority, from municipality to municipality, from district to district, from official to official.”
A heavier tent
According to Schonewille, how quickly you hear back after a permit application or amendment varies from district to district – and the differences between municipalities are even wider. “I also organize other festivals around the country, and it’s different everywhere.”.
The tent structure Loveland used at Music On had stood at a festival in The Hague just over two weeks earlier, where the municipality had approved it. More than two weeks later Loveland took additional measures for the same tent – adding extra ballast to weigh it down – yet the Omgevingsdienst Noordzeekanaalgebied maintained its negative assessment.
“The inspection, where the relevant authorities come to your site, happens only the day before,” Elshof says. “That makes sense, because you’re not done building until then. But if something is rejected at that point, you have very little time to adjust or fix it.”
That, ZeeZout founder Schonewille says, shows the system needs to be overhauled. “There should be a central registry of certified tents – tents whose structural calculations have been verified. Then you don’t have to push the same tent through the bureaucratic grinder every single time.”
Showing the Euros on a big screen
The EVA says the current system is inefficient and breeds uncertainty. “Organizers invest months in safety plans, structural calculations and permit processes. When assessments shift along the way, or turn out to depend on differences in working methods, you end up with a situation that nobody wants – including the authorities themselves. Safety cannot become an exercise that depends on your postcode.”
Elshof offered the broadcasting of the European Championship as an example. Two years ago WestWeelde was the only venue in the city with a big screen, because Elshof was the only organizer who had applied for a permit in time.
“For this World Cup I already emailed the City after the draw in December to ask whether we’d be allowed to screen the matches at night,” he says. “They were supposed to set out the rules in February, but that didn’t happen until a few weeks ago. When they make decisions that late, it becomes more and more expensive for us to get everything organized in time. This World Cup has been on the calendar for years, and the late kick-off times were known well in advance.”
Double the work
In the end, the permit application had to be resubmitted. Elshof filed it ten weeks before the World Cup begins – the standard lead time for events with up to 2,000 visitors – but the City’s permit rules were published only after he had already submitted it. “So that was needlessly doing everything twice.”.
Schonewille says he recognizes the pattern, and that the current rules breed arbitrariness. “Whereas there should be no ambiguity at all, and everyone should know in good time where they stand. What happened at Music On is terrible. It affects everyone – the whole industry. We all need to look at the system together so this doesn’t happen again. We have to prevent these kinds of disasters.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.parool.nl ’
