Ultra Will Stay In Miami... For Now

The future of Ultra Music Festival is no longer in peril—at least for now. Today, Miami's Mayor Tomás Regalado postponed the discussion that would have banned Ultra from Bayfront Park, a 32-acre public park that has been its longtime home in Downtown Miami. According to multiple reports on Twitter and on CBS Miami, the Miami commission wil reconvene to decide Ultra's fate at an April 24 meeting.

Despite a legal agreement with Bayfront Park Trust that gives Ultra the right to stay until 2018, the mayor and other city officials argued that Ultra had broken the terms of its contract. Citing this year's tragic trampling of security guard Erica Mack, the death of 21-year-old Adonis Escoto, the 83 arrests made over the weekend, and the overall "deleterious effect" they claim the festival has caused to Downtown Miami, they say there's plenty of reason to give Ultra the boot.

In response, Ultra deployed the preferred mode of online slacktivism: they launched a Change.org petition to fight the ban and keep the festival in Miami. So far, the petition has racked up almost half of the required 50,000 votes. Tiësto, Danny Avila, and several other EDM superstars have endorsed it with their votes and support via social media.

Ultra argues that accidents and fatalities are, regrettably, a part of any large-scale sporting or entertainment event—but the petition also reveals a few rather surprising aspects about their security measures. Apparently, Ultra deployed 18 undercover officers from both the Department of Homeland Security and DEA. This practice is unusual, if not unheard of in event promotion, and it's unclear why DHS and DEA agents were necessary when, according to the petition, 239 other police officers—49 more per day than in 2013—were already making the rounds that weekend.

The festival's use of federal government agencies is hardly the crux of the issue here. Nor is the $233 million that Ultra brings to the local economy. Instead, this is the age-old story of rave versus city.

We saw a similar battle play out in 2010, when a 15-year-old girl died of a drug overdose at Insomniac's Electric Daisy Carnival, then in Los Angeles. The girl's family filed a suit against the promoter and venue—Insomniac and the Coliseum—and the LA Times published an investigative report that linked raves to drug deaths. Insomniac's Pasquale Rotella fired back, calling for EDC fans to send hate mail—sorry, "voice their perspectives"—to the LA Times reporters, even providing the reporters' email addresses and Twitter handles. Ultimately, EDC took the show to Las Vegas, Nevada, a state with a more forgiving attitude towards drugs and vice.

We saw the battle again in 2011 at EDC Dallas, where a number of arrests and one fatality caused fire officials to shut down the main stages, order the music and lights to be turned down, and usher crowds to the exits. Insomniac was slapped with seven citations, and Dallas mayor Dwaine Carraway professed that the city needed to be more careful about the kinds of events it books in the future.

Most recently, we saw the battle of City vs Rave in 2013 in New York City, when two deaths caused the cancellation of Electric Zoo's final day. This time, Mayor Bloomberg defended Electric Zoo's founder Mike Bindra, and blamed the fatalities on "people here who are doing drugs that shouldn't be doing drugs." Electric Zoo is now planning to return to its home in New York's Randalls Island, albeit with a reinvigorated safety protocol in place.

This age-old tensions between local communities and festival organizers has been going on since the dawn of neon. In Ultra's case, it's important to remember that the festival has been in Miami for sixteen years. Back in the 90s, the festival was seen as a welcome financial boost to a city crippled by financial scandals and corruption. Before the condo construction boom of the mid-00s, Ultra was the only sign of life in Downtown Miami on weekends at the end of March. Miami has survived both the 2008 recession and subsequent burst of the real estate bubble. It has entered a new era—one where the excesses of massive EDM gatherings are no longer considered occasional irritations, but Big Problems. Ultra may be safe in Miami today, but its future is far from certain.

What can you do to save permanently Ultra? Sign the petition. Or call the Mayor's office. Or take the wheel in steering the national conversation from clumsy finger-pointing to a more thoughtful appraisal of drug education and harm-reduction measures at raves and EDM festivals. This last one might be the most difficult, but it'll damn sure be the most meaningful.

@michellelhooq