Lessons (possibly) learned from BBQ VIII
Reporting and Commentary by Councilperson Robert Lynch; August 31, 2026
On the final weekend of August, Enfield’s Stone Bend Farm threw a party. Many people came. Many people rejoiced. Many who’d paid their $60 and passed through Stone Bend Farm’s gates that Friday and Saturday had a good time. But many of Stone Bend’s neighbors—those who’d paid with only their aggravation and insomnia—did not.
“We survived,” one weary Hines Road resident described her lived, 48-hour experience at midday Sunday. She stood roadside close to where Hines Road meets Porter Hill and spoke from the heart as cars and campers ambled past, their occupants heading back to wherever they might call home.
BBQ VIII had ended. Thank Heaven it had ended, some would say. The two day, high energy cavalcade of rock bands—a well-promoted “two day event of music, art and camping.”—extinguished the last of its intense musical campfires in the wee hours of Sunday. Even at Noon that day, glowing embers of the auditory inferno could still be heard leaking from the event center’s indoor amps. Consider it a final reminder of free spirited fun all too fleeting; tunes furnishing a proper sendoff to departing attendees and dispensing a clean-up motivator for event center staff.
Neighborhood concern about the event intensified at the Enfield Town Board’s August 12 meeting. Supervisor Stephanie Redmond and the Town Board’s majority said there was little the town could do to stop the barbeque. Frustrated residents braced for the worst.
Yet, in honesty, “the worst” never happened.
“I want to thank you all for a very successful Barbeque,” Stone Bend Farm owner Terry Bloom posted on Facebook Sunday as a closing message to celebrants—and by extension, to the Enfield community. “We sold it out. Everyone was happy, everybody was safe, everyone was respectful,” Bloom stated.
“Thank you so much for keeping this place clean and safe,” Bloom signed off. “We love you all. See you next year.”
Yes, there will be a “next year.”
One Hines Road neighbor claimed that the music played until 2:30 AM both nights. Another neighbor said he’d gotten little sleep the first evening. If asked, he might have reported getting little the second night as well.
Terry Bloom will be the first to tell you that Stone Bend Farm played by the rules. And most likely it did. His hosting BBQ VIII was no brazen defiance of local regulation. Problem was, there was little local regulation for Bloom to brazenly defy.
And that’s where the Enfield Town Board steps in. In this Councilperson’s opinion, it should. Indeed, it must. Because by Terry’s own admission, there will be a BBQ IX one year from now. It may be even bigger and louder. Count on its return because the celebration Bloom’s event center cooked up this past Friday and Saturday has become all too successful for anyone to abandon anytime soon..
Consider it my judgment; seasoned judgment based on my more than a half-century of having lived here: Enfield is a libertarian town. “Please leave us alone,” people tell us. “Zone”—as in “Zoning”—is a dirty, four-letter word, this town’s majority of residents would inform you.
But as with all things, liberty has its limits. Property ownership conveys rights. In Enfield, a person’s home—including one’s curtilage and that grassy strip the Town may mow—is one’s castle. And he or she who owns it will defend it. And in pursuit of that defense, no one should need to rope off a roadside with stakes and plastic ribbon or plant sawhorses in the driveway just to stave off the Versa’s or Volvo’s of swarming rock fans as though they were invading tanks of the Russian army.
Near the corner of Porter Hill and Hines Roads—within earshot of Terry Bloom’s amplifiers, and in some instances, far beyond that earshot—people marshaled homegrown self-defenses this past weekend. Stakes and ribbons became the preferred weapons of choice that Hines and Porter Hill Road residents employed to inform any partygoer that their roadside grass was definitely “off limits” to parallel parking. Even the Hines Road home where Bloom once resided got posted.
To those driving either road during the festival, the pathway to one’s destination resembled a cattle chute.
Bill and Barbara Armstrong own 2,300 feet of frontage on the northeast corner of Porter Hill and Hines Roads. It includes the field directly across from Stone Bend Farm. Bill Armstrong flagged it all. John Rancich, whose nearby home along Hines Road burned in 2024, but who still owns much land along Hines, did the same. Rancich even roped off field entrances as far as a mile from the concert venue for good measure. Nearly everyone—other than Bloom—had roadsides barricaded.
Test Drive: Saturday, August 29; about 9 PM; driving Porter Hill Road, uphill toward Hines:
Lit by only my low beams (with little help from the full moon), I stopped behind a line of parked cars on Porter Hill’s west side. The line was long. The parked cars on my right and taped barricades on the left shoulder had narrowed the already-tight Porter Hill into an alternating, one-way path. I saw oncoming traffic, so I waited… and I waited. The facing car blinded me with his “brights.” It didn’t seem to move, or dim. Impatient, I inched forward, knowing not whether we could pass. I reached the entrance to Stone Bend Farm and its ticket booth that kissed the pavement.
Yes, that facing vehicle had stopped in the northbound lane. Porter Hill had turned into a loading dock. Somebody was taking his time packing or unpacking band instruments. I rolled down my window. “What do you need?” the attendant, standing at the centerline, asked me. “To proceed through here,” I tersely answered. “Go ahead,” she said. I did.
At least what I’d encountered Saturday was safer than what I’d found the night before. Friday, I saw people walking down the center of Porter Hill Road toward the ticket booth. Anyone driving faster might have hit one of them. In a perfect world, Porter Hill Road would have been blocked off.
Luckily, there were no accidents during BBQ VIII. Worst that happened, I was told, was Saturday night when a driver missed the corner, tore through the ribbon, knocked down a few stakes, and landed in the ditch. No need for a tow truck. Helpers nearby, a neighbor said, pushed him out.
As that observant neighbor snapped the mishap with her phone, she remarked “That’s one.”
To their credit, Stone Bend Farm and BBQ VIII promoter “New Planets” staff did their best to keep roadside order during those two days. Bloom permitted shoulder parking along his own property. Most others did not.
On Saturday afternoon, a New Planets security staffer was seen patrolling the roads near Stone Bend Farm on an ATV. He counseled attendees to park in a paid lot that Stone Bend Farm had secured for the weekend. Parking cost $15 daily or $25 for both days.
On Friday evening, a neighbor counted 104 cars in the paid lot, but as many as 110 roadside. He reported 64 remained on the road by early the next morning and about an equal number in the lot.
That patrolling parking proctor advised this Councilperson that any who’d parked in places where they shouldn’t would need to move. He’d scrawled warning messages on vehicles’ side windows ordering drivers to move or be towed. When I revisited the roadside nearly five hours later, most of the offending vehicles remained.
BBQ VIII has ended. Performers and partygoers have gone home. Stakes are disappearing, ribbon wound up. What now?
For everyone’s benefit, whatever needs to be done needs to be done now—not a month or two before next summer’s BBQ IX. Laws and regulations take time to adopt. More importantly, public opinion needs to ferment, to sink into the minds and agendas of those in power. It needs to be amplified by numbers, volume and repetition. Remember, this Enfield Councilperson is but one member of five. Others need to be persuaded. And it takes three votes to make a majority.
No one wants to drive Terry Bloom or Stone Bend Farm out of business. Yet all of us—including Terry—must recognize that rural events centers are commercial enterprises, businesses inherently incompatible with the surrounding neighborhood. Regulation can be tricky, yet necessary.
Two most difficult challenges lie ahead, based on the neighborhood complaints I have received. They involve control of parking and noise.
To quote one Stone Bend farm critic at the Town Board’s most recent meeting, “This town should not have to provide Terry Bloom with a parking lot.” Long strings of shoulder-parked cars on a narrow country road impose traffic risks. Attorney-Councilperson Jude Lemke claims Enfield needs a local law to ban parking on road shoulders. If she’s correct, we should adopt that law.
Look to Danby. In response to similar concerns there, the towns of Danby and Ithaca each imposed “No Parking” prohibitions on their respective sides of Sandbank Road in front of the South Hill Cider events center and for hundreds of feet each side of it.
Did it take a local law, or merely a site-specific—and less cumbersome—town board resolution to enact those restrictions? Enfield’s retained legal counsel should investigate. And then Enfield should follow Danby’s lead and our attorney’s guidance.
Moreover, should Stone Bend Farm choose to host future major events, it should enlarge its own, vastly undersized parking lot. It should develop an expansion plan, bring it before Enfield’s Planning Board, and secure site plan approval well in advance of BBQ IX.
Noise regulation, of course, always entails compromise. “We are not owed silence,” Bloom informed the Town Board at its mid-August meeting. “Who decides when loud music can be played and when it can’t?” Bloom asked. The owner alleged that modulating volume and content sounds like “fascism.”
Well, no, it doesn’t. And many a Stone Bend neighbor takes umbrage at that blistering accusation. Music can convey beauty. It can also annoy. People need sleep. They deserve the right to enjoy the night quiet. We must share our pleasures.
Performing amplified music until 2:30 AM breaches that delicate human compromise. We, the Town Board, should investigate enacting “quiet hours” legislation. Perhaps an 11 PM curfew would strike the proper balance. We may need to investigate decibel level limits at the property line.
Finally, Enfield may need to revisit its 2010 Mass Gatherings Law. A superseded 2000 Mass Gatherings Law had set the projected attendance threshold at 1,500 persons. The 2010 revision lowered that minimum attendance to 500.
Unaware of the latest law, Terry Bloom had initially planned to sell 500 tickets to BBQ VIII. Had he done so, it would have triggered Enfield’s law and all its requirements for advance notification and the filing of detailed plans for traffic control, parking accommodation, sewage disposal, medical services, and more. By lowering ticket sales to 350, Stone Bend Farm evaded the reach of the 2010 law.
Need Enfield reduce the attendance threshold still further? A “Special Event Law” under consideration in the Town of Danby would extend regulation to events that plan to attract 300 people or 150 cars on properties of more than five acres in size, or as few as 100 people or 50 cars on parcels of an acre or less. Should Enfield follow Danby’s lead?
“I have thousands of people that will come to our defense as to what we are doing up here,” Terry Bloom told the Enfield Town Board August 12 as BBQ VIII’s host faced his first intense interrogation by critics. “It is only positive,” Bloom asserted.
But while BBQ VIII may have been “only positive” for those who’d partied inside the gates and witnessed band after band perform on the event center’s “Toro Stage,” the festival was not so joyous for those who sensed they needed to ward off the masses from a potential pint-sized reprise of Woodstock or just to get a couple good nights’ sleep.
Rock festivals are ephemeral. Neighbors who live nearby stay for the long haul. There’s a difference. Enfield’s leaders must respect that difference. Because if they don’t, Stone Bend’s neighbors—joined by like-minded residents throughout the town—will find new Enfield leaders to govern them.
Meanwhile, in the ever-present shadow of Stone Bend Farm, Terry Bloom has fences to mend. Let’s hope he mends them.
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