AUSTIN, Texas — Austin Parks and Recreation (APR) provided more details on how it plans to restore the Great Lawn at Zilker Park after rain and heavy foot traffic at ACL damaged the grass last weekend.
“People’s feet and the weight and the friction of their shoes just beat down through the leaf, and it ends up damaging the crown of the plant, and you end up with mud,” explained Casey Reynolds, Ph.D., who serves as Executive Director of The Lawn Institute.
(Photo: CBS Austin/Jane Page)
In a news release, the department said it is “fully committed to protecting the park and the Great Lawn’s long-term health.”
APR said several teams are “on-site daily working with event organizers to monitor ground saturation, turf health, and drainage performance in real time.”
C3 Presents, the production company behind the Austin City Limits festival, will fund the restoration as required by its contract with the city.
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In a statement to CBS Austin, C3 wrote,
For 25 years, ACL Fest has enjoyed an incredible partnership with both the City of Austin and Austin Parks and Recreation. Every year, ACL Fest remediates any areas of Zilker Park that need repair following the festival, and this year will be no different. Over the years, ACL Fest and Austin Parks Foundation have also invested millions to build, improve, and maintain the great lawn. ACL Fest has called Zilker Park home for 25 years and we have always been proud stewards of the space.
Austin Parks and Rec said it will conduct standing water extraction, deep core soil aeration, soil remediation and resodding as needed to restore the lawn to its pre-festival condition.
Based on the visuals of the damage, Reynolds is optimistic the remediation process will go smoothly.
“Many of those areas are going to be perfectly fine,” he said. “I saw plenty of space where people were walking. There was still good grass intact; it just looked a little beat down. But certainly, the places where they were shoveling mud and it looked, you know, very, very muddy, those places will likely need to be resodded.”
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Katie Kennedy, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Austin Parks Foundation (APF), says that parks around Austin benefit from ACL each year.
“A portion of every ticket sale goes back to our parks,” Kennedy said. “And so, since this partnership started more than twenty years ago, we have invested more than $79 million back into our parks.”
“While Zilker is the crown jewel of Austin and it gets a lot of love, there are a lot of parks in underserved areas that don’t really see that much attention,” she continued. “And so this allows us to really spread the wealth around and ensure that all of these parks are accessible and clean and well maintained.”
Austin Parks Foundation also awards a series of grants, funded by ACL ticket revenues, to various stakeholders looking to improve their local park or host public “activation” events.
Anyone interested in applying for a grant can click here. APF also details its impact across the city, and website visitors can filter for projects funded by ACL grants.
The Great Lawn will see more foot traffic for ACL’s second weekend, as well as for the annual Trail of Lights in December.
APR has not released a timeline for the repairs, but information on its park closures webpage says the Great Lawn is scheduled to be closed until Oct. 18.