Organizers of canceled concerts say city officials misled them
AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - Concert organizers say city officials kept them in the dark about soil stability problems that are blamed for the cancellation of the much-touted XPR Augusta festival at Lake Olmstead.
The claims are made in a legal response filed in court by C4 Live, which is series of high-profile concerts never took place as planned during last year’s Masters week.
Shortly before the concert series, C4 learned that “dangerous subterraneous/subsurface defective conditions” meant the field could not the stage, other structures and the crowd, the company says in the filing.
“There would be safety issues with respect to the attendees because, among other things, EMS vehicles could not even operate on the field because of these issues,” C4 says in the counterclaim to the city’s lawsuit.
C4 hired experts who “concluded that the scope of the necessary repairs and related engineering work would take a considerable period of time.”
That meant the concert series had to be canceled on short notice, the company says.
The company says city officials knew about the problem before the sublease was signed on Jan. 14, 2020.
C4 says it only later learned that emergency medical vehicles could not operate on the field during GreenJackets when the minor league baseball team played at the stadium.
“In fact, the private ambulance company hired for those games had to use 4-wheel drive off-road vehicles, commonly called ‘gators,’ when it had to operate on or across the field for a medical emergency,” C4 claims.
The company says various city agencies knew of an instance when a tractor sank into the field during the Banjo-B-Que Festival and “could not operate due to the turf’s inadequate load bearing capacity.”
The company said Augusta Commission member Sean Frantom, who was closely involved in the talks and negotiations, must have known about that incident because he mentioned it in a March 4, 2022, news interview.
The company claims that repairs to the field would be considered “capital maintenance and repairs” and thus not the responsibility of a tenant.
The company says “all during the pre-leasing negotiations,” it demanded that the city and/or Augusta Economic Development Authority make the necessary repairs.
“They refused,” the counterclaim states.
The authority is in complete, unequivocal breach,” the company says.
The C4 counterclaim is made to a lawsuit in which the city claims C4, by starting but not finishing an attempt to renovate the stadium, failed to surrender it in good repair.
“Defendant left the Stadium in a state of destruction and caused it to be unusable,” the city lawsuit alleges.
The city says C4 in reality canceled the concert series for its own business reasons.
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