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« Spring board | Plebispite »

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Mud bowl

Mike Fleury gets his hands dirty.

Posted by Michael Fleury on Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 8:48 AM

When throwing a house party, there is usually a direct correlation between how many guests you invite, and how shitty your house looks the next day. If you invite 10 people, someone might break a beer bottle or two. If you invite 30 people, your older, flimsier furniture may be at risk. If you invite 200 people, make sure the party is held at someone else’s house.

And if you invite 50,000 people, you’d better be prepared for a clean-up. The Common has survived its first major outdoor concert—although it has come away with its share of battle scars. The ground closest to the stage on the northern corner of the Common now features fewer grass and more ruts, as illustrated in this week’s On Patrol (slightly down and to your left).

The responsibility for refurbishing the grounds on the Common lies primarily with the concert promoters, not the city. The $100,000 in municipal funding will offset some of the extra expenses the city took on to accommodate the concert (extra busses, extra cops…), but the money and the method for repairing the ground on the Common will ultimately come from the concert promoters, and the concert’s profits.

“We’ve structured the arrangement with the promoter so that there are sufficient funds set aside to cover that damage,” says Events Halifax representative Scott Ferguson. Events Halifax put on the concert, with promotion company Donald K Donald.

No exact figures of concert profits have been released, or exactly how much money will be devoted to the clean up. Donald K Donald rep Donald Tarlton told the CBC that fixing the Common would be a relatively easy job, costing no more that $6,000. Ferguson says that the north corner of the Common will indeed be getting special attention beyond the normal seeding-and-aeration that happens annually on the rest of the public grounds.

“We’ve gone out for proposals from the private sector about getting the Commons back to what it was in advance, and we’ll probably be concluding an agreement with someone in the next 48 hours,” he says.

Although the method hasn’t yet been finalized (“There could be some sodding, but it’s also a prime time of year for seeding…I’m not an expert in that area, but I expect it will be a combination of both.”), Ferguson says that the Commons will “absolutely” be back to normal by next spring.

We certainly hope so. It’s profit margins versus clean-up in a fight to the death! We’ll be interested to see who wins.

Rocking pneumonia

Clean-up aside, kudos to the roughly 50,000 fans who braved the rain (the cold rain) last Saturday to see Kanye West (we understand that he rocked). Also, to check out those Rolling Stone fellows.

Not to be the harbingers of doom here, but given the weather conditions on Saturday, which alternated between wet, cold and downright miserable, it might be wise to prepare for the impending spread of Rolling Stones Influenza on the Halifax peninsula—concert or no concert, it’s just not healthy to stand outside during a mid-September downpour for 6-8 hours at a time.

Check yourself for symptoms, Halifax. Get lots of rest, eat plenty of Goat’s Head Soup, a spoonful of Brown Sugar helps the medicine go down, yada yada yada…. Also, try to make as many lame pop culture references as possible. It’ll ease the pain.

Under the weather, on top of the news. Email: mikef@thecoast.ca