Ultra Music Festival Weekend 2 Gets Approval by Miami
The verdict is in and the city of Miami, Florida has decided to approve the second weekend of Ultra Music Festival after all! The City of Miami even agreed to provide an additional 100 police officers for the weekend despite their concerns about traffic in the city and the potential drug use.
Marc Sarnoff, Commissions Chairman, was leading the initiative to block the second weekend from happening. Other city officials weren’t against this notion, due to the expected 300,000 people in attendance. Even though no formal vote was taken by the City, most of the commission members and Mayor were in support of the second weekend of Ultra Music Festival. Also it didn’t hurt that Ultra Music Festival offered the City of Miami an additional $500,000 in order to help pay for extra police and fire services.
The feedback wasn’t all positive though for Ultra Music Festival as the Mayor said:
“If the 2nd weekend has a negative impact, I’ll be the first one saying this is never going to happen again.”
The City-Festival Relationship Stayed Tense For Years
That Mayor’s warning ended up being pretty prophetic in spirit, even though Weekend 2 went ahead and continued as part of Ultra’s Miami format for several more years afterward, the underlying tension between Ultra and the city over noise, traffic, and neighborhood impact never really went away. Downtown Miami residents living around Bayfront Park kept raising the same complaints year after year, and that friction eventually became a recurring storyline in local news coverage of the festival well beyond this specific approval fight.
It’s also worth noting just how much financial leverage Ultra was already throwing around to keep the second weekend alive, a $500,000 offer to cover extra police and fire costs is a serious sum for a single event, and it says a lot about how much the festival’s organizers understood exactly how valuable that second weekend of ticket and vendor revenue was to the bottom line. Approving Weekend 2 despite real safety and logistics concerns is a good early example of just how much economic weight a festival of Ultra’s size could throw around in negotiations with a host city, a dynamic that would keep shaping Ultra’s relationship with Miami for years to come.
This particular fight over 300,000 attendees and 100 extra officers also foreshadows just how much bigger the logistics conversation around Ultra would get. As the festival’s attendance and footprint kept climbing through the mid-2010s, the same core questions raised here, how much policing a crowd that size actually needs and how much disruption downtown residents should reasonably tolerate, kept resurfacing pretty much every single year the festival negotiated its permit with the city.
