Arts Art News, Part II
The organizers of Hempfest Monday filed a lawsuit against the city of Seattle because the annual rally, to be held this year Aug 19 and 20, is still waiting to receive its event permit along with details about how the Seattle Art Museum will accommodate Hempfest’s need for a loading lane adjacent to the Olympic Sculpture Park under construction on the Elliott Bay waterfront downtown. (Hempfest is held at Myrtle Edwards Park next to the OSP site.)
At the end of the day Monday, SAM’s director of capital projects, Chris Rogers, said the museum would be sending a clarifying letter in response to the suit. I couldn’t reach the head of the city’s special events committee, Virginia Swanson. Rogers did say, though, that Hempfest and SAM may run into a conflict depending on how many large trucks Hempfest plans to drive through the construction site. Basically, Rogers said, the trucks would delay construction, and the museum can not afford any more delays since the four-month public conversation about the county’s trolley barn, which county executive Ron Sims promised to move but which didn’t have a new home by the time SAM needed to remove the barn, pushed the park off schedule, Rogers said. Originally set to open this summer, the park now will open Oct 28.
But SAM is required to accommodate Hempfest, festival spokesman Dominic Holden says. He points out a city ordinance passed unanimously by the council in June requiring SAM to “ensure safe public access … to ‘Special Events’” during construction. Holden says the museum has been dragging its feet on this event since Hempfest filed its permit application in January. He also says the city is in violation of its law to process special-event permit applications “within sixty (60) days of the application, if practicable.” (Both Rogers and Holden say the city regularly passes out permits only days before an event.)
Holden says the lawsuit, which Hempfest threatened a few months ago, is the result of SAM’s consistent maltreatment of its construction process. He says the city has had to pick up the pieces of SAM’s mess all along the way. He cites as examples the removal of the trolley barn, traffic problems around the area, a crane that fell on train tracks in March (no one was hurt), and the fact that Ivar’s pulled out of its Fourth of July Festival this year. Ivar’s told the P-I that the construction was a deciding factor in pulling out, and Holden says he would like to know how much money the city had to spend providing basic and emergency services that would have been provided by Ivar’s during the firework.
Meanwhile, Rogers said that with the transformation of the scraggy waterfront land into a park, Myrtle Edwards Park nearby may no longer be the right place to host a festival that brings 150,000 to 200,000 people, as Hempfest does. He called upon leadership from the city in setting guidelines for land use in the park. (Holden says the site is the only area in the city that’s large enough for the event and not in a residential neighborhood.)
Holden said he expects Hempfest will go on, and with minimal intrusion in the construction of the sculpture park. He sees the sculpture park as a beautiful addition to downtown—as long as it doesn’t interfere with the First Amendment right of marijuana reform advocates to assemble in the public park.
And Rogers, too, said Hempfest will go on. He said the museum has been participating fully in the preparation process for months, and that pulling everything together is the responsibility of the city’s special events committee.
I’ll write more as I know it. Preliminary thoughts?
SAM's metaphorical britches have gotten too big, and their Board of Director's Executive Staff represents the fussy fuck museum donors who want Seattle re-made into their fussy fuck deep pocket funding image (I am not talking about the progressive donors who want expensive artwork available for viewing by the masses and limit their string pulling to the museum's mission (a public (not privite) art museum)
Seattle isn't that big of a town, and that very same multi-millioniare developers who complain about monorail shadows and favor one-way "good neighbor" agreements that are only for night-life business owners, are the very same multi-millioniare fussy fucks who dononate enough money that their names are engraved on the donor wall and that their phone calls are taken personally by the executive staff.
HEMP FEST FOLKS: Keep fighting the good fight, on all fronts y'all.