Settling for the Sounds of Silence

The Orange County Fair properly has agreed to give two neighbors some peace of mind to accompany the quiet engendered by the absence of rock concerts at the fairgrounds.

Fair officials agreed this month not to collect nearly $52,000 in legal fees from Jeanne Brown and Laurie Lusk. That’s quite an olive branch, considering that at one point last year a lawyer for the fair said it might seek to have the women pay “reasonable” attorney fees from a lawsuit, which the lawyer put at $3.3 million. A judge later said the women would have to pay $51,672. Now even that amount will be waived, in exchange for their agreement not to carry their lawsuit to an appeals court.

While the fair generally has tried to be a good neighbor, with weekend swap meets and specialty shows and the annual county fair, the amphitheater on fair property has been the problem. The Pacific Amphitheatre opened in 1983 and was sued for excessive noise the next year. Although the state owns the fairgrounds, the concert venue was owned by the Nederlander Organization, which books music into a number of facilities in Southern California.

The lawsuits became enough of a problem that Nederlander in 1993 sold the amphitheater to the fair for $12.5 million. Two years later the fairgrounds sued Nederlander, contending the company knew the sound restrictions made the theater useless. Brown and Lusk joined the lawsuit on Nederlander’s side, figuring that was the best way to keep the new owners, the fair, from violating noise restrictions.

But Nederlander settled with the state for $16 million. That meant the state essentially got the amphitheater for free and several million to boot, not a bad deal. But Brown and Lusk did not want to settle, and became liable for the fair’s attorneys’ fees.

For now there are no plans for new concerts at the amphitheater. The venue should remain silent unless the noise can be kept low enough to meet the restrictions and give the neighbors some peace. The fair’s board is about to start a two-year study of overhauling the entire fairgrounds. Deciding what to do with the amphitheater should be an important part of the study. The performances there were usually music to the ears of concert-goers, but at too high a price for the neighbors.