By MATT NICHOLLS
DRUG-sniffing dogs and additional police will be rostered on to clamp down on revellers at the Sunset Music Festival later this month.
Inspector Chris McKinnon said the festival would go ahead at the Armidale Showgrounds on 26 April after organisers agreed to pay for the cost of an extra 10 police officers.
“Those 10 officers will be inside the venue and have been paid for, while we will roster on an additional 10-12 officers on the day to work that evening,” he said.
“I’m hopeful we will have an incident-free event.”
Sunset Music Festival organiser Joakim Ho said there were still a couple of fine print details to work through with the police, but said everything was on track.
“I don’t like to count my chickens before they hatch,” he said. “But I’m hopeful we won’t have any problems.”
Ticket sales have been slow for the event – a week ago just 150 had been sold – but Mr Ho said he was hoping for at least 3000 people to attend.
“I know with A Day on the Green they sold 1000 tickets in the last week, so we are not panicking yet,” he said.
The headline act for the Sunset Music Festival is the Potbelleez.
Meanwhile, residents of nearby homes have been told they will need permits to access their properties on the day of the festival.
Sunset organisers did a letter-box drop last week to tell residents to expect loud noise on the day and to inquire about permits so they could access their homes.
They were also offered tickets to the festival.
Armidale Dumaresq Council received numerous complaints from residents of the adjacent Kennedy Street, but their concerns were largely ignored when councillors voted to approve the festival’s conditions at an extraordinary meeting last month.
“The application for the proposed music festival included details on how the event would be managed and when the event would occur,” council’s planning manager Karl Bock said.
“A number of conditions have been imposed by council to ensure that adequate plans are in place to manage the different aspects of an event like this,” he said.
“These relate to the hours the event occurs, managing noise levels and people movement in terms of traffic flow in and out of the venue.”
