Group pulls plug on Riverhead Blues Fest

For more than a decade, the Riverhead Blues Festival has drawn between 10,000 and 20,000 people to the Peconic River waterfront each summer for a weekend series of performances -- but no longer.

The board of the nonprofit Vail-Leavitt Music Hall, which ran the event, said this week that it can no longer afford to sponsor it and will not apply for a town permit to host this year's festival.

It was not unexpected, especially after the bitter fight that broke out last year over who would run the festival, and the Riverhead Town Board's decision last year that -- in a time of fiscal austerity -- it could no longer afford the expense of police overtime and cleanup costs, while all the event's profits went to the music hall.

According to Riverhead Town Board member James Wooten, the decision to charge for town services was due to several changes in festival operations over the years.

One was attendance fees. The festival was originally free, but organizers now charge admission of $10 or $16. In addition, for the past few years the festival has prohibited attendees from bringing in their own food and drink, requiring them to use its vendors.

"It was a kind of hard pill to swallow; we pay for garbage and police, and close off our [municipal] parking lot for two days, and you have to pay to get in . . . $16 for two days. That kind of irked me," Wooten said Monday. "We don't charge admission for the Riverhead Country Fair. . . . When you start closing off a parking lot that the taxpayers own and charge residents to get in . . . that's not good."

For its part, music hall officials said the festival isn't the cash cow many of its critics believe it to be. Robert Bartha, president of the Council for the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall, said that last year the event brought in $79,000 while the event cost more than $72,000 to put on, leaving a net profit of $6,771.