What's the best plan for the Charlottetown Event Grounds? The city's looking into it

Charlottetown Mayor Philip Brown said he wants to see changes to the city's event grounds to make them more attractive for festivals. 

That comes after Thursday's announcement that the new SunDaze Music and Art Festival will move to Confederation Landing Park.

"I believe council wants to look at this and really address this issue so that we can utilize that Charlottetown Event Grounds for all types of events," Brown said.

Organizers were busy on Friday morning with planning for the festival after they needed to change venues before their event at the end of August.

Festival organizer Sam Murphy said Confederation Landing was their first choice when they contacted the city to relocate the festival to Charlottetown.

'It looks like a packed house'

Murphy said the park was the perfect size and setting for the festival. The event grounds were not as esthetically pleasing and were considered too big for the event they were putting on.

"If you put three or four thousand people in the event grounds, it looks kind of empty," Murphy said. "If you put three or four thousand people in Confederation Landing, it looks like a packed house."

Some downtown residents who live nearby the park are concerned about those three or four thousand festivalgoers.

"When the event is over, that's our biggest concern," said David Brown, the president of the Charlottetown Downtown Resident Association. "When they're leaving the event grounds, they have to go through the [residential] areas."

Mayor Brown, who is David's brother, said the government-funded venue was set up a decade ago to alleviate those concerns. 

The whole idea of its creation, he said, was "to take the selling point of Confederation Landing, put it into a bigger venue — away from the backyards of neighbourhoods — and try to sell it as a place to have festival events," the mayor said.

'Underused in their current form'

A report by the provincial government called the event grounds "underused in their current form."

Charlottetown's mayor says that's proven by the fact that SunDaze festival organizers picked Confederation Landing Park.

"We have to look at how we can remodel it so that you can have the large events and then you can have smaller or medium events," Brown said.

The Charlottetown Event Grounds is owned by the Charlottetown Area Development Corporation and managed by the Eastlink Centre.

The event manager who handles booking for the event grounds said that the site could have still been a good fit for the festival.

Event Grounds not consulted

"Nobody approached us. We were surprised as everyone else when we saw it in the media that this even was taking place," said event manager Dave McGrath. 

There is still a lot of uncertainty about what the future holds for the event grounds. Holland College has been in talks with government about taking the space over.

The mayor said that even if that does happen he hopes the grounds are somehow revamped to make them more attractive to festivals of all sizes.

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