Photo Courtesy Country Calling Festival
While more arrests were reported last weekend, officials say traffic improvements and sunny skies contributed to the success of the first-ever Country Calling Festival.
More than 50,000 concertgoers converged on downtown Ocean City last Friday and Saturday for the inaugural Country Calling Festival, held at the south end of the beach and Boardwalk. Learning from the recent Oceans Calling Festival, which started out with heavy rains and transportation delays, officials say they were better prepared for this weekend’s event.
“Country Calling weekend went very smoothly,” City Manager Terry McGean said this week. “We carried around 27,000 bus riders each day and the promoter helped out by providing additional buses and drivers to supplement our fleet at the end of each day. This helped to significantly reduce wait times leaving the event. EMS and police calls from within the festival grounds were also minimal. Great job by the Ocean City team and the promoter.”
Earlier this year, promoter C3 Presents shared plans for a two-day country music festival to follow its popular, three-day Oceans Calling event. And last Friday, against the backdrop of sunny skies, the first-ever Country Calling Festival kicked off in downtown Ocean City.
Ocean City Tourism and Business Development Director Tom Perlozzo said 55,000 tickets were sold ahead of Country Calling and roughly 51,000 attended each of the two days. In preparation for the influx of visitors to downtown Ocean City, officials said improvements were made to the transportation system that attendees used going to and from the festival grounds.
“The biggest change was that the promoter contracted with an outside school bus company to provide additional buses for the 8 p.m. and beyond timeframe to get people from the festival to their destination,” Transit Manager Rob Shearman said. “We were skeptical coming in as to how smoothly that would go because of the inability to communicate between the two services. But we used some unused radios to get people on the same channel, and they performed admirably.”
Thank you, taxable tourists!
Dwight Yoakum aka Buck Owens Jr.