X-Fest’s fate is up to City Council

To X or not to X, that is the question.

On Tuesday, April 26, the Modesto City Council will decide whether to grant longtime area promoter Chris Ricci a permit this year to continue his long-running Xclamation Festival, known affectionately and otherwise as X-Fest. If granted the event, which started in 2000, would be in its 17th year of bringing thousands and thousands to the streets of downtown Modesto to listen to music, socialize, dance and drink for one day a year.

The questions that swirl around X-Fest and its permit this year bubbled to the surface after two rival petitions were circulated surrounding the event. The first was started last year by fine-dining establishment Galletto Ristorante, which sits within the festival grounds, when management collected signatures from more than a dozen fellow downtown business owners in an effort to get the event moved out of the area. And then Ricci started his own online counter petition to keep the event as is along a 10-block radius, which stretches across 10th to 12th streets and I to H streets.

But at the heart of the controversy is a question about perception, reality, potential and the vision of what Modesto officials want for its downtown. When you boil down the base concerns of the dueling petitions, the fight becomes a simple one of two business owners with differing interests and agendas. Galletto managers have said X-Fest cuts into their profits. And Ricci has said X-Fest makes up the majority of his profits.

Yet the profits of one private business vs. that of another private business is clearly not all being weighed here. Instead there is a complex debate about public safety and public image at work that drives concern and much consternation about X-Fest and its future.

What isn’t up for debate is that each year for more than a decade X-Fest has attracted 10,000 to 15,000 people to downtown streets for several hours of age 21-and-over fun. The crowd skews young and racially diverse. The music has skewed to reflect that crowd’s taste, meaning in recent years it has been largely hip-hop heavy. And people drink, sometimes too much, while listening to said music.

If some Facebook and online comments are to be believed, that same crowd at X-Fest is an unrelenting bunch of troublemakers and criminals. Yet, according to Modesto Bee records, arrests during X-Fest have progressively dropped over the years – from about 30 to 40 in the early years to 10 to 15 in more recent years. The vast majority of all arrests stemmed from alcohol-related offenses. Ricci has paid for local law enforcement and private security costs for the event since its inception.

Granted, the event has had incidents both major and minor in the past. Over the years, there have been scattered reports of vandalism, including broken windows. In 2014, an attempted rape was reported when a female security guard was leaving the event and headed to her car. And last year at an unsanctioned and off-site location, seven people were shot and one killed at an after party following X-Fest.

This year Modesto Police Chief Galen Carroll and Ricci have come up with a new security plan that would allow Modesto officers to patrol the outside perimeter of the event while relying on private security inside the gates. In a meeting with The Modesto Bee editorial board, Carroll told us that the officers who staff the event off duty (while being paid overtime by Ricci) do not like working it because they don’t like “dealing with drunk folks.” Given the recent national debate, their reluctance to be seen using force on inebriated and confrontational people in a large public setting is understandable.

Should we welcome common-sense recommendations to keep X-Fest safe and maybe even make it safer? Absolutely. But we should also recognize that many of the current safety issues are more about perception and potential than anything else. They’re about the possibility of violence, the possibility of negative publicity.

In the end what the city must decide on Tuesday is whether they think having a large – and by all accounts profitable – one-day event that brings thousands of diverse young adults to party in the streets of Modesto is worth it, or whether they would rather X it out all together.

Elsewhere around the Scene:

If you caught the last Democratic presidential primary debate, you caught Modesto-raised Broadway performer Morgan James singing the national anthem.

Before Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders squared off on CNN, the 1999 Johansen High School graduate performed the “Star Spangled Banner” to a national TV audience. Since moving to New York, James has been in four Broadway productions (“Motown the Musical, “Godspell,” “Wonderland” and “The Addams Family”). Last summer she returned to Modesto for a show at the State Theatre. See her performance of the anthem online at www.modbee.com.

This story was originally published April 19, 2016 at 4:24 PM with the headline "X-Fest’s fate is up to City Council."