Audrey Caro Gomez
Overall calls for service went down at this year’s Willamette Country Music Festival, but there was an uptick in alcohol-related offenses, especially regarding minors in possession, Linn County Sheriff Bruce Riley told the Linn County Board of Commissioners.
“Part of that is due to a little more aggressive stance that we’re trying to take with that,” Riley said during a post-event discussion with commissioners on Sept. 7. Anne Hankins, president of Willamette Country Music Concerts, also spoke before the board.
A lot of the problems were in the camping area, not the venue, Riley said.
He presented LCSO’s stats from the 2015 and 2016 events. This year there were 43 MIP-related incidents; last year there were 15. There were 51 arrests and citations in 2016; last year there were 18.
There were 13 reports generated this year, up from eight last year.
Part of the increase is that more people may be making complaints, he noted, but also LCSO is trying to do a better job of tracking.
In 2015, LCSO made some recommendations to the festival staff, which included stricter alcohol enforcement.
Hankins said WCMC used social media to alert attendees, before the concert, that they would be cracking down on under-age drinking.
“The MIPs (are) an issue for us too,” she said. “‘Issue’ is a different word than I want to use. It is a concern for us.
“We did a Facebook post that had a young lady in handcuffs and said, ‘Don’t let this be your new set of bracelets. If you’re underage and drinking, we’re looking for you.’”
Festival security focused their searches on the camping area, she said.
“We actively went around and if it looked like a party, smelled like a party, we were there addressing it,” Hankins said. “If they had beer pong tables set up, we were there shutting it down. They got one warning, not the MIPs, but the party activity got one warning to shut it down, put it away and obey the rules.
“MIPs got no warnings; we turned them over to law enforcement or (Oregon Liquor Control Commission), so we took a pretty active stance on that.”
Once identified, they had an hour to pack up their campsites and leave, she said.
Over the weekend, 49 campsites were trespassed and 156 wristbands were cut, Hankins said.
Offenders were also blacklisted from buying tickets for the 2017 event.
“We know that they can always find a way, but of course it shows that we have a no-tolerance policy,” she said.
Commissioner Roger Nyquist asked Riley about the disparity in the way the law is enforced most of the year compared to the weekend of the festival.
If a licensee with the liquor commission had 46 MIPs on their premises, they’d be given a 10-day termination letter the next day, he said.
“But this is a temporary, three- or four- or five-day event, and they’re not obligated to play by those rules?” he asked. “I’m not saying that they should have to, but help me with that.”
Riley somewhat agreed.
“I get it. I totally get it,” Riley said. “Throughout the year, that’s what we’re all about. Keeping the peace in the county and saving and protecting lives.”
Throughout his career, he has been on plenty of alcohol-related calls.
“I think my staff, of anybody in this community, sees the negative impact of alcohol, what it does,” Riley said. “How do we curb that? Is this an anomaly compared to what goes on in the county the rest of the year? That’s a tough question.”
Sheriff’s Office personnel deal with MIPs all the time, he said. And they deal with alcohol-related crashes frequently.
“There’s an uptick when you get 25,000 people for four days, all of which, mostly have a party mentality,” Riley said. “(For) a lot of folks this may be their weekend to really let loose the whole year. Whereas what we see throughout the county is well, some people really let loose at Christmas, and some people let loose at graduation and some people let loose on their birthday. So that constant trickle but what we see is this bubble in Brownsville for four days.”
Riley did say he feels there was an improvement in the quality of security the festival staff provided.
“Not only communications but the way they handled things,” he said. “They’re security folks. We told them from the get-go…the Sheriff’s Office is not there to be their lawn chair and blanket police. We’re there to investigate and enforce laws, investigate crimes.”
Vickie Green, who owns a DJ business and has attended many of the festivals and Oregon Jamborees, expressed some security concerns during the public comments at the meeting.
Commissioner Will Tucker said he has known Green for about 30 years, noting that she helped organize the Oregon Jamboree when it first started, and helped with the Willamette Country Music Festival when its founder, Warren Williamson, was still involved.
He said Green contacted him with concerns about this year’s festival and was going to write a letter. He told her there would be a public meeting on the topic.
Deputies were easy to identify, Green said, but there weren’t enough of them. She said the only festival security she saw was when they checked her bag at the entry gate. She said the presence of security, in identifying T-shirts, would be a deterrent to some the things going on in the campgrounds, including under-age drinking and cruising.
Sheriff’s Lt. Michelle Duncan, who was running command at the festival the entire weekend, said WCMF had changed some of its policies so that security staff wear shirts that identify them.
She also agreed with Riley that things had improved this year.
“I went to several calls personally, where they needed assistance from us,” Duncan said. “Compared to previous years that I’ve worked out there, they had really improved on their professionalism. The way they handled the public and just taking care of problems that needed to be taken care of without overtaxing our resources for things that didn’t need to be, which had been kind of an issue previously.”
The maximum number of deputies at the festival is 12, to respond to the 25,000 people attending the event.
When Commissioner John Lindsey asked Riley how he feels about the size of of the event, Riley said it taps him out.
“We don’t have any intention of going past 25,000,” Hankins said. “Our five-year permit doesn’t have any growth in it at all.”
Tucker asked Riley about DUI’s on the road outside the venue.
“That’s the catch-22 of this whole thing, right?” Riley said. “The camping area can be an issue and a problem, so do you cut back on camping and then force people to go home, which then increases our DUIIs on the highways and potential deadly crashes? Or do we increase camping or allow it to be the numbers that they’re at to allow people to stumble back to their trailer and sleep it off?”
Tucker agreed.
“Camping does two things for us,” he said. “One is the flow of traffic in and out each night and the second is the fact that someone has a place to go back to.”