BP funds help with festival

PENSACOLA, Fla. — When the annual SpringFest music festival here lost its momentum and more or less petered out five years ago, this coastal city lost some of its luster as a north Florida entertainment Mecca.

A pair of young businessmen decided to do something about that slight, and the first De Luna Fest was born.

And despite an initial skepticism typically reserved for the young — whose ideas often exceed their reach — Scott Wheatley, 30, and Nick Bodkins, 25, are mere hours away from pulling off a $2 million coup that should restore a large portion of Pensacola’s image and provide a huge tourism boost for a city hit hard by the fallout of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster.

With musical artists like Stone Temple Pilots, Willie Nelson, 311, Bush, Daughtry, 30 Seconds to Mars, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Bravery, Better Than Ezra, Cowboy Mouth and Dierks Bentley among the 44 acts confirmed to appear at the three-day De Luna Fest, the white sands of beautiful Casino Beach at Pensacola Beach will be the place to be at a time when, as famous Gulf resident Jimmy Buffett has eloquently noted, “The Coast is clear.”

“We’re hoping for 20,000 people each day of the festival, so this is a huge event, not like anything our company has ever worked on since I’ve been here,” Jade Lantz with the Pensacola-based Ideaworks marketing/PR firm said Tuesday. “It’s having a really big impact already on all of the individuals and companies involved.

“There have been a few glitches in these last few days, a few miscommunications that we’ve had to deal with, but for a first-time event I think everything’s coming together pretty smoothly. There’s a great deal of excitement about the festival.”

To help spur Pensacola’s hard-hit tourism industry and to kick off what they plan to be a 50-year countdown to the city’s 500-year anniversary, Wheatley and Bodkins joined local movers and shakers Scott and Emily Mitchell — whose family owns the city’s historic Seville Quarter — to form the Five Flags Tourism Group. Their first big event was to be a music festival on the beach.

Then the BP oil spill happened.

“The beach needs our support now more than ever,” Bodkins said. “Small businesses on the beach need this festival. We’re bringing amazing live performances to our area with ticket prices that will encourage people of all ages to support Pensacola Beach while having fun.”

With interest in what was originally a two-day festival going viral, the group secured $300,000 in funding from the Escambia County Tourist Development Council — $50,000 of which came from a BP fund — and added a free third day of music, which will be headlined by Nelson.

“We’ve sold tickets in 36 states and two foreign countries so far,” Lantz said. “We submitted PR releases nationwide, and when Sam’s Club came on board as a corporate sponsor, they did their own release, which was huge.

De Luna Fest, which is a revival of De Luna’s original American beach party held in 1559, kicks off Friday with music on three separate stages fronting the Gulf of Mexico. Tickets, which are $80 (online) for the weekend and $75 at local outlets (Seville Quarter, the Bridge Bar and the Sunset Lounge), are available at www.delunafest.com. VIP ticket-and-travel packages start at $275 and are available online or by calling (888) 9DELUNA (933-5862).

A festival lineup is also available at www.delunafest.com.

“The planning for this event started before the oil spill, and there was never talk of canceling it,” Lantz said. “The festival was going to go on: They had a Plan B and even a Plan C in place. And when Monday morning rolls around, (organizers) have already said they’ll start working on next year’s festival.”