The Town of Hillsborough has cancelled IxtapaFest 2025
Greetings,
The Town of Hillsborough just notified El Restaurante Ixtapa that it must cancel IxtapaFest 2025, and that if they proceed with the festival, the Hillsborough police have been notified to shut it down.
For the last 6 years, I have been the IxtapaFest organizer, and -- having never needed a "special event permit" in the past -- I was surprised (upon my May 1st return from Mexico) to discover that applications for special event permits must be submitted two months prior to the event.
The town's justification for requiring a "Special Event Permit" this year is as follows: "This event (i.e., IxtapaFest) has grown exponentially... It has grown to the size of the town requiring a Special Event Permit for such a gathering and it needs to be postponed until the permit is applied for, reviewed, (and approved)."
Just last week, IxtapaFest co-founder, Robert Hudson, and I were talking about the surprising fact that IxtapaFest has not grown. Yes, we have a good turnout of perhaps as many as 100 people per hour, but to refer to the event's growth as "exponential" is a provable falsehood as mendacious as any of the bilge that oozes from the mouth of His Malignancy.
It is unfathomable how the town's representative got this "exponential" notion in her head.
There is NO information to support it.
None.
Zero.
Niente.
Nihil.
Nicht.
Zilch.
Notably, IxtapaFest was visited by Hillsborough police officers two years running -- once because an ill neighbor complained about speaker volume ... a situation we immediately remedied; and another time because a neighbor wanted festival-goers' cars removed from the perimeter of his property.
On neither occasion did the police officers ask us for a "special event permit."
Here is my "take" on the situation, and from here on, you are "on notice" that I am speaking from an aggrieved heart, and you may not wish to expose yourself to my negativity.
Caveat emptor.
Proceed at your own risk.
Also...
Please note that I am writing this "critique" without having had any prior communication with El Restaurante Ixtapa's management concerning my personal views expressed below.
I have remained incommunicado because I do not want them insinuated in my personal grievance.
Ixtapa management and employees have NOTHING to do with my views on this matter.
If memory serves, all Hillsborough restaurants (indeed all restaurants in Orange County) pay a 1% "restaurant tax" on gross proceeds, and so, it seems to me that whatever a Hillsborough restaurant decides to do with its "already-taxed" property is their business, and that the municipality -- in this instance -- is "double-dip freeloading."
Ultimately, "the proof is in the pudding."
And the past five years of IxtapaFest experience have shown that there has never been a problem with rowdy behavior --- not so much as a single "sloppy drunk."
The event is so convivial, happy, joyful that, as the Eagles sang in "Hotel California": "We haven't had that spirit here since 1969."
As I understand it, a foundational motivator for Hillsborough's insistence that Restaurante Ixtapa secure a "special event permit" is that now -- in IxtapaFest's sixth year -- the town suddenly deems it necessary to have uniformed security guards patrolling the event (at Ixtapa's expense).
I'm reminded of Mayor Daley's infamous quip at the 1968 Democratic National Convention: A federal commission, led by local attorney and party activist Dan Walker, investigated the events surrounding the convention and described them as a "police riot". Daley defended his police force with the following statement, which was also a slip of the tongue: "The confrontation was not caused by the police. The confrontation was caused by those who charged the police. Gentlemen, let's get this thing straight, once and for all. The policeman is not here to create disorder. The policeman is here to preserve disorder."[33]
I think it is more likely that a disgruntled IxtapaFest attendee with a "bone in his nose" about "the time he was mistreated by a cop" would "have words" with a security guard rather than festival-goers "acting out" with one another.
Consider.
Ixtapa has a tiny kitchen with one large stove/oven, a grill and a deep fryer, and is therefore limited in the number of individual customer "orders" it can produce. I mention this limitation because I believe kitchen size is a key element in keeping the number of festival attendees limited to about 100 per hour throughout the eight-hour festival day.
The upshot of this limitation is that the restaurant (whose food preparation is supplemented by an outdoor taco stand) is incapable of increasing its income in a way that allows hiring security guards, who, in any event, have always proven unnecessary. (There is also the number of porta-potties the town would likely require to serve a crowd whose numbers, in their erroneous view, have increased "exponentially.")
So, in order to avoid unnecessary, stressful, and adverse factors from affecting the festival, I will no longer produce Ixtapa's annual music festival - a volunteer effort in which I have no financial interest.
If the Town of Hillsborough also insists on security guards, "special event permit fees" (and other collateral expenditures) for "solo" events featuring single bands or individual performers, those events will cease as well.
At bottom, El Restaurante Ixtapa is gifting the community with annual music festivals (and other "solo" music events) that are priceless cultural gems.
If the town persists in mandating these unnecessary permits, guards, etcetera, then -- although the municipality has the indisputable right to do so -- they are making a grave, ill-informed, detrimental decision by proceeding with costly requirements rather than undertaking some kind of governmental "easement," recognizing that there is much more at stake here than the need to heed bureaucratic procedures.
Although I am a persistent critic of Donald Trump (whom I refer to, accurately, as "His Malignancy") we have a "president" who tells the entire bureaucratic structure of these "United" States to enact his will, without any thought for The Common Good, The General Welfare, a truly "Social Contract," or the Constitution itself.
In fact, the more manifestly cruel Trump's behavior, the more he and his goosestepping followers delight in the mayhem.
It is said that we now live in "The Post-Truth Era," and - by my lights - the town of Hillsborough's use of the phrase "exponential growth" falls under this post-Truth rubric.
So here we are in our "little corner" of North Carolina, disregarding the greater good -- The Common Good -- by putting unnecessary, irksome and extortionate procedural impediments ahead of The Great Gift that IxtapaFest lavishes -- at its own considerable expense -- on the people of Hillsborough, Orange County - and beyond.
Perhaps we should prioritize what is essential -- even "existential" -- and not treat "the procedural" as an indispensable "sine qua non."
"Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone." Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2595abcvh2M
El Restaurante Ixtapa should be applauded and rewarded for its efforts, not subjected to unnecessary bureaucratic meddling, no matter how "legal" that harrassment may be.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Our federal and state governments are broken.
Et tu, Hillsborough?
I am not insensitive to the quandary of officials whose mandated adherence to protocol obliges them to "play by the book."
But it is a pity - as it is also pitiable - to enclose them in bureaucratic exoskeletons that oblige their ignorance of "the greater good" on behalf of their "effective job execution."
Perhaps when "the General Welfare" and a "Community Treasure" are both at stake, the matter should be vetted with the town mayor and the town council to determine if exceptions are in order.
Maybe such an appeal will fall on deaf ears.
But at least we would know that a sizable percentage of local officialdom have looked at the matter in a way that obliges them to determine whether the "substantive good" does not trump the mechanistic workings of legalistic punctiliousness.
Thanks for listening.
Alan (Archibald)
PS Obliging the cancellation of IxtapaFest may be legal - even obligatory by statute - but it still impresses me as unconscionable.
N.B. During the pandemic, El Restaurante Ixtapa was one of the scant Hillsborough restaurants that remained open throughout the contagion, providing dependable, timely roadside pickup. Notably, Ixtapa freely undertook this initiative, knowing that roadside pickup was a crucial public service. When "the balance of justice" takes into account "all moving parts," that balance often tips in an unexpected direction.
