A Small Town Hosts the Nation's Largest Concert
Handling the onslaught of traffic, crime and health needs of the 80,000
people who attend Bonnaroo every year is an art form for local officials.

BY: Zach Patton | August 2011

http://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/A-Small-Town-Hosts-the-Nations-L...

For 361 days a year, the old McAllister Farm outside Manchester, Tenn.,
is a quiet, uninhabited patchwork of fields and trees. But for four days
every summer, the farm morphs into the sixth-largest city in the state
of Tennessee, packed tight with nearly 100,000 people. That’s because
the 750-acre farm is home to Bonnaroo, a massive annual concert event
that’s become a mecca for music lovers around the globe.

Bonnaroo is big. Really big. Since it debuted in 2002, it has become the
largest festival of its kind in North America -- bigger than
Lollapalooza, Coachella and Burning Man. Rolling Stone has called
Bonnaroo “the ultimate over-the-top summer festival.” Every year, a
sold-out crowd of approximately 80,000 concertgoers descends on the farm
outside Manchester, along with another 5,000 or so guests and crew
members, and thousands more volunteers. Most of the attendees camp on
the farm, but hotels for miles around are also booked solid a year in
advance.

All that can be more than a little overwhelming for the small town of
Manchester, a sleepy burg of about 10,000 people, about 65 miles
southeast of Nashville. When Bonnaroo’s not around, Manchester has the
lazy feel of Anytown, U.S.A., with a placid little courthouse square at
one end of the main drag and a string of fast-food chains out by the
interstate. Hosting a large-scale event is a challenge for any city, but
it’s particularly daunting when a festival’s arrival means a tenfold
increase in the local population. Handling the onslaught of traffic,
crime and health needs of that many people is an art form for local
officials. The event this June marked the concert’s 10th anniversary,
and officials say the past decade has been an extended course in crowd
control.

“Bonnaroo is a lot of work,” says Manchester Mayor Betty Superstein.
“But it’s a lot of fun. And the community really has kind of embraced it.”

The big reason residents have come to love the Bonnaroo ballyhoo is the
concert’s financial impact -- the event pumps $20 million a year into
the local economy. In addition, the concert has contributed more than $1
million to charity groups in Manchester and surrounding Coffee County.
Earlier this summer, for example, the town saw the opening of a new
amphitheater funded entirely through contributions from Bonnaroo. There
are other business impacts, too: The large-scale stage construction
company that builds the venues for Bonnaroo recently relocated from Los
Angeles to Coffee County, and three new hotels have opened in Manchester
in the past two years. “I can’t see why three new hotels would go up
except for one reason,” says Superstein. “And that’s Bonnaroo.”

Still, the sheer size of the event means lots of work for local
officials. “For Bonnaroo week, everybody’s got a duty,” says Manchester
Commissioner of Safety Ross Simmons, who heads up the city’s police and
fire departments. Managing the arrival of the concert, he says, is like
coordinating with a neighboring town. “It’s a hayfield most of the year,
but once they get set up, it’s kind of amazing. Bonnaroo is a city
within itself.”

Ask any local official about the first year of Bonnaroo, and you’ll get
a universally negative response:

“Horrible,” says Superstein.

“Awful,” says Simmons.

“A nightmare,” says Coffee County Sheriff Steve Graves.

They’re referring to the traffic, which was by all accounts, epically
bad. The concert that year had only one entrance -- at the end of a
narrow two-lane road. Traffic was brought to a standstill for miles. The
trip from Nashville, which normally takes about an hour, stretched into
a 16-hour slog. Interstate 24 became a parking lot. Superstein, whose
house sits on a hill overlooking the interstate, remembers watching from
her front porch: “I could see people stopped on the interstate, get out,
walk up to the Waffle House, eat, go back and get in their car, and
nothing had moved. They set up picnics in the median.”

The problem, officials all agree, is that they simply didn’t think so
many people would actually come. “We didn’t believe them when they said
80,000 people were going to show up,” says Superstein. “Here? In
Manchester?”

Today, the traffic flows smoothly. The venue now has six separate
entrances and multiple roadways dedicated to concert traffic. City
police and the county sheriff’s office coordinate to manage the flow.
They bring in state troopers to help direct traffic. There’s now even a
temporary interstate exit that’s dedicated solely for Bonnaroo-bound
drivers. “Now, everything’s running as smoothly as it can,” says Graves.

Once the event is in full swing, the traffic subsides and officials turn
their attention to the other persistent issue: crime. Graves sets up a
full-scale mobile command center in a small field just outside the
Bonnaroo site. There, his team can respond to calls within the concert
venue, and arrest and process offenders on site before transporting them
to jail.

Mostly, though, they wait. Over 10 years of Bonnaroo, Graves says he’s
learned that it’s often best to let the concert’s private security
handle the problems before turning offenders over to the sheriff. “We
answer calls inside on a need-to basis,” he says. “If a private security
guard goes up to someone and has to take them out, there’s usually not a
problem. But if a police officer goes in and takes them out, it can
cause a riot. So we try to let their security handle it. If they can’t,
we’ll go in.”

The majority of offenses involve drugs and domestic fights.
Unsurprisingly, the problems tend to escalate as the event stretches
into the third and fourth days. “The heat gets to a lot of people,”
Graves says -- it is June in Tennessee, after all. “The crimes usually
progress as the concert goes on.” When it comes to narcotics, Graves
says his team focuses most of their energy on drug dealers, particularly
those who are pedaling lethal substances. “Believe it or not, there’s a
lot of fake drugs. There’s a lot of people who come here just to rip
kids off. Those are the ones that cause the majority of the problems.”

Inevitably, the combination of heat, drugs and alcohol can have fatal
consequences. Ten people have died in the 10 years of Bonnaroo,
including two deaths this year. Predictably, the causes have included
heat stroke, drug overdoses and injuries from auto accidents. For the
most part, though, Graves and other officials say the concertgoers are
just there to have a good time. “Most of these kids who come here for
the concert are no problem at all,” Graves says.

Mayor Superstein agrees. “All the kids are easygoing. It’s a really
mellow crowd.”

Still, hosting an event like Bonnaroo isn’t easy for city and county
workers. One sheriff’s deputy, when asked what it takes to put on a
concert like this, laughs and answers with just one word: “Miracles.”