Following ACL Fest, parks board calls for close look at Zilker Park health

Amid concerns over the impact on Zilker Park from this year’s Austin City Limits Music Festival, city parks staff said they have conducted the annual review of the festival and are beginning the work needed to replenish the park. The cost for aerating the soil and other restorative measures will be paid for by concert promoter C3 Presents/Live Nation.

Monday’s meeting of the Parks and Recreation Board featured a presentation from the Parks and Recreation Department, which works closely alongside festival staff to identify areas in need of repair before and after the six-day festival.

Jason Maurer, PARD’s sales and event manager, said parks staff began conducting a detailed inspection of Zilker Park following the final day of loadout last Friday. That multiday process results in a detailed list of steps the city or appropriate vendors will complete to help the park recuperate from having tens of thousands of visitors on the Great Lawn for two weekends each October. As per the city’s agreement, the event promoter pays for all of those costs, Maurer said.

The presentation came after the Rewild Zilker community group circulated drone photography that showed several portions of the park looking brown, distressed and trampled after the festival. Responding to speculation that ACL Fest had used more park area for staging and preparation this year, Maurer said the event’s footprint has stayed the same since it expanded to two weekends in 2013.

“I am a naturalist and I love parks and I love green. So standing out there on the dirt and thinking about the soil ecology … that dirt was powder,” Board Member Lisa Hugman said. “Even compacted, it was not a nutrient-rich dirt. I’m standing a few feet above the aquifer and just wondering what your studies, what PARD knows about when nutrients are depleted from soil, then there’s not a natural filter for the aquifer.”

Maurer said PARD’s soil specialists had dug into the soil in several areas shortly before the festival began and discovered black, nutrient-rich soil feeding the grass to keep it healthy. He said that soil health was the result of the park’s irrigation system that also delivers the needed nutrients, while the powdered dirt Hugman noted was likely from a combination of grass pulverized by foot traffic and mulch used throughout the park to absorb moisture from rains before the event.

“The grass has been impacted, but it is not the blade of the glass that matters. It is the root systems, and that is from our turf maintenance experts that tell us that,” he said. “The biggest contributor of dust at a festival is the blades of grass as they dry out, and then also the mulch that goes out expels a lot of dust.”

While daily attendance at the festival is capped at 75,000 people, some commission members questioned if severe weather conditions and overuse as Austin’s population grows may necessitate limiting attendance at events that put heavy strain on the grounds.

Maurer said changes to the city’s ordinances concerning events in parks have already caused a gradual reduction in major foot traffic throughout the city’s parks. And he noted that daily monitoring of ACL traffic shows the maximum number of people in the park is routinely 10,000 to 15,000 below the maximum allowed.

Commissioners and Maurer seemed in agreement that a yearlong study of park health through all of its major events and other uses would be beneficial.

“If you look at the hillside at the pool, what it experienced this summer is the same conditions you saw on the Great Lawn: It has just been hit heavy by people loving their park to death. … A study of an entire year’s worth of use would really be helpful to kind of take a look at,” he said.

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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Posted In: Parks, District 5