Vernon, N.Y. (CelebrityAccess) — With just over a month before gates are due to open, details on the 50th anniversary Woodstock festival, including an on-sale date for tickets, are still scarce.
The festival, which hopes to bring as many as 65,000 people to Vernon Downs, a harness race track in Oneida County, New York, is planned for Aug. 16 to 18, a scant seven weeks away.
According to the Syracuse Post-Standard, festival organizers have applied for a mass gathering permit, making the deadline which requires the application to be submitted 45 days before the event with just a week to spare.
However, the Post-Standard reported that the application provided by the festival was a bare minimum and lacked key elements including traffic plans, state health department’s approval, sanitation, and drinking water plans and details about the stage construction, which will all be necessary for approval.
“It’s getting close,” Jody Thieme, Codes Enforcement Officer for the Town of Vernon, told the Post-Standard. “It takes a lot of organization before this happens.”
Town officials have sounded the alarm about the festival as well. On Tuesday, Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente released a statement that expressed concern with the festival’s progress in light of the time remaining.
“With the event just a little over a month away, we have been asked to prepare in just days what has failed to get done in over a year of negotiations and preparations at the previous location,” Picente told the Poughkeepsie Journal.
“With such a short time frame the logistical hurdles to ensure the public health and safety of the concertgoers and the surrounding community could pose a significant challenge,” he added.
The festival, which was announced earlier this year, has since faced multiple setbacks, including the loss of its major financial backer Dentsu Aegis Network, who dropped out of the event and accused organizers of incompetence. Festival organizers also engaged in a subsequent and unsuccessful legal battle with Dentsu over more than $18 million in funding for the event, as well as the loss of its original Watkins Glen venue and two different production companies.
