The town of Tisbury is readying for the Beach Road Weekend music festival, which returns to Veterans Memorial Park August 25 through August 27.

At its meeting Wednesday, the select board learned the town’s police and fire departments have completed their safety plans for the festival, an expert has been called in to evaluate the conditions of the park fields and a protocol to deal with the festival’s sound is being put into place.

To assess the park where the festival will take place, turf specialist Ian Lacey of Tom Irwin Advisors in Burlington, Mass. arrived on Island Wednesday, said town administrator John (Jay) Grande.

“We’re hopeful that baseline will clear the air on [post-festival] remediation … because there have been questions in the past regarding the condition of the field,” he said.

“There are other activities this consultant will do for the town, in terms of post-festival evaluation and future operation and maintenance,” Mr. Grande added.

Beach Road Weekend organizer Adam Epstein has paid the town the agreed-upon licensing fee of $37,500 and provided a $25,000 security deposit, Mr. Grande told the board at Wednesday afternoon’s meeting in the Katharine Cornell Theatre.

Mr. Epstein, who attended the hybrid meeting in person, said that while some festival equipment has already arrived at the park ahead of the August 15 set-up date, it’s not occupying recreational space.

“The park is fully available at this point,” he said.

“We work in a very secluded area … and we do store it, so that there’s nobody wandering around the construction,” Mr. Epstein told the select board and Mr. Grande.

The festival also is using two stalls in the Lagoon Pond Road parking lot for vehicles that provide cellular communication for emergency services, he said.

Set-up of performance stages and other festival infrastructure on the park fields won’t begin until after the women’s softball league concludes its championship play-offs, Mr. Epstein said.

The park will remain open to the public until August 18. Mr. Epstein said it will be closed until Sept. 1, though the festival hopes to have reopened on August 30.

Attendance at the festival will be capped at 12,000 people a day, Mr. Grande said, and the town is waiting to hear from the Steamship Authority on a request to shift the 8:30 p.m. ferry departure from Oak Bluffs to Vineyard Haven on each of the three nights to make it easier for off-Island crowds to disperse. The boat line board meets Tuesday afternoon. 

Mr. Epstein detailed the festival’s new sound management plan, developed after neighbors complained about excessive noise from the live music.

“We have created teams of people who will monitor sound levels around Tisbury and in the park throughout the original sound check and throughout the festival, to ensure that the sound outside the festival grounds never exceeds state noise ordinances,” he said, noting that Tisbury has no specific ordinance to apply.

Six festival workers, working individually during the sound check and in teams during the festival, will be responding to complaints and communicating directly with the sound engineers in the park, Mr. Epstein said.

“They’re going to be using an app [called] Decibel X that allows for video recording of the decibel reading at the moment that it’s taken,” he said.

“It’s got GPS, and it shows you the time and location stamp in the screenshot … All of it is really objective data, based on a proven evaluation of audio levels,” Mr. Epstein said.

Tisbury police will maintain a hotline for festival calls, using the department’s non-emergency phone number, Chief Chris Habekost told the select board.

Complaints to that number will be communicated to the festival team, Chief Habekost said.

Beach Road Weekend will also provide a complaint form on its website, Mr. Epstein said.

“So people can either call the TPD or they can fill out the form themselves. They can do it anonymously … or they can actually put their name on it and tell us exactly where they want us to go,” he said.

“They can give us [an address] as simple as cross streets, if they don’t feel like they want to be, you know, out there talking about it explicitly, but every one of these will be investigated with a decibel reader,” Mr. Epstein said.

Public safety announcements from the town will be posted at tisburyma.gov.