Recently, the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) festival, Groove and Bass, was held in the Pontiac. According to the organizers the event brought in almost 2,000 people to the park held just outside Bryson.
Understandably, there were some complaints about the noise from the event, as well as concerns over safety of its participants.
The fact that Groove and Bass will return next year have some in the community wanting to take steps to regulate its festival.
Warden Jane Toller suggested banning the event in a Facebook post, after receiving complaints about the noise. However, to her credit, she changed her position after receiving backlash in the comment section of the post.
Toller’s position is now to introduce a unified noise bylaw in the MRC Pontiac to lessen the impact of festivals like this on residents. Tollers full comments can be read in the story Toller talks about position on raves/ people moving to the Pontiac on page 1.
However, the Pontiac needs to think carefully about how it proceeds in regulating festivals like this.
The around 2,000 people who attended the festival over the course of a week is not an insignificant number, especially for the businesses near the event.
As repeated over and over again by the MRC and other organizations, tourism represents an important present and future industry in the Pontiac. Attracting people here has often been repeated as the most viable way to revitalize the region.
Picking and choosing the people who then choose to come here may not be a luxury the Pontiac can afford.
The culture of EDM may seem foreign and even a little dangerous to people unfamiliar with it, but like anything, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
EDM culture and its accompanying industry has been around for decades. The organizers and others involved know what problems can arise and obviously take steps to mitigate them. These are people who don’t have their fun ruined by bad vibes and having to constantly deal with authorities.
The event was outfitted with professional security, aid stations, surveillance and other amenities and precautions to ensure the safety of festival goers.
Furthermore, the kind of people who go to these events tend to be what can best be described as modern hippies. Peace, love, unity and nature were major themes of the event. Under the surface, these people are mostly harmless.
Will things go wrong? Of course. But things also go wrong anytime a large number of people gather to get intoxicated. No one is suggesting pushing away the Shawville Fair though.
The solution is to work with the organizers of Groove and Bass and events like it to be mutually beneficial. Instead of focusing on the negative and trying to regulate the problem away, and therefore creating problems and costs around enforcing those regulations, we should focus on the opportunities these kinds of festivals present.
Using this festival and others like it as a means not only to benefit local businesses, but as an opportunity to highlight the beauty of the Pontiac and its people is the right way to go.
Working with festivals like this, to both enhance the good and avoid the bad, seems like a no brainer.
The organizers plan on bringing Groove and Bass back to the site annually for at least the next couple of years. So, the Pontiac can either work with them to its benefit or clash with them, which will of course, cause problems and cost taxpayer money.
It’s easy to react negatively to subcultures we may not be familiar or even comfortable with, but if we can be tolerant and smart about it the Pontiac could stand to gain quite a bit from events like this.
Brett Thoms
