Waterbury whining wins
Aging residents of Des Moines’ Waterbury neighborhood discovered an effective way to address the noisy concerns coming from concerts at nearby Val Air Ballroom: make more noise.
Complaints to the West Des Moines city council and to Val Air management have seemingly taken their toll, as the Val Air owners split with manager and concert promoter Chris Cardani last week and signed with Wisconsin-based PMI Entertainment Group. PMI has provided services for large-scale events in Wisconsin like the Ducks Unlimited Great Outdoors Festival, as well as concession and catering for Lambeau Field and the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame. Managing heavy metal concerts hasn’t made their bragging list, and that will certainly please the apparent not-so-hard-of-hearing who reside east of 63rd Street.
The owners of the Val Air Ballroom — the Zamora family — aren’t explaining the reason for the change, but they don’t need to. The Waterbury residents bitched and moaned loudly enough. They paced the pavement of the neighborhood, asking for signatures on their petition to control the noise. They shook their canes at the West Des Moines city council demanding they force the Val Air to turn the volume down. And they penciled out their views to the local media, including letters written to us in response to an editorial we published stating that if the music was too loud, they were too old. The crudest of the letters were anonymous and showed up weeks after we published the editorial. Let’s just say they weren’t from typical Cityview readers.
We hope the Val Air will not be minimized to weddings, banquets and retirement parties to simply appease the neighbors, as many of them will refuse to drive across the border into West Des Moines anyway, regardless of the draw.
Meanwhile, Cardani has built a solid business with concerts at the Val Air and filled a void in the metro for smaller audiences than venues like Wells Fargo Arena are interested in. We hear he is working on at least one new option —without elderly neighbors — at a location in Clive. Thumping bass may shake the dust off the cars at nearby auto dealerships, but we doubt complaints will arise that would even remotely compare to the Waterbury whining. Peace and quiet will be brought back to the neighborhood, at least until the new Val Air management team realizes that bingo won’t pay the bills. CV
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