So what you're wondering is: had the city in question, the target of their love, been Mountain View all along?
Or did their love for San Francisco go unrequited, and Mountain View was just the sloppy-seconds rebound?
It may not surprise you to learn that it was the latter.
They'd been planning this event for ages, but of course they had to start advertising long before the permits were finalized, because -- who am I kidding, you know why. So it turns out that the stadium parking lot is actually owned by the Port Authority, who rent it to the City of SF (of which they are not already a part? I don't understand) and then SF rents it to the Giants. So there are three enormous bureaucracies who get to stick their fingers in.
Well, at the last minute, the Port Authority told them:
"You can't sell bottled water."
"What the?"
"It's bad for the environment."
"What is this I don't even."
"No."
"We're doing an under-21 dance party, we make all of our money from water sales."
"No."
I've never heard of any precedent for a bottled-water ban. Certainly there are no local laws about it. This appears to simply be the whim of someone at the Port Authority.
Then on top of that, while they knew the prices for most of the permits they were waiting on from the City, the Police Department was forcing them to do a "10-B" which is, basically, a shakedown. The "10-B" thing is when you are forced to hire off-duty police officers to work as your security staff, and both the officers and SFPD get paid for it. (You also might guess that these officers don't really work for you, so they don't have your interests at heart. You'd be right.) Well, the promoters couldn't get a straight answer about how much they were going to charge for that until the last minute (because apparently the algorithm SFPD uses for pricing 10-B is, "How much have you got?") and that number turned out to be significantly higher than anyone expected, based on what it had cost in the past.
Plus, their presales were a little low. That, combined with the ballooning costs and the elimination of one of their primary revenue streams meant they decided to move the whole thing to Shoreline at the last minute. The better terms they got from Shoreline also meant that they could make it be a 16+ event instead of an 18+ event, and that they could go all the way until 11pm instead of being forced to close at 10pm.
The goal here was to create a 40,000+ person annual festival in San Francisco, and that has now been 100% torpedoed because of SFPD's greed, and because some random bureaucrat doesn't like bottled water.
So once again: San Francisco would really, really prefer that you not do business here.
Have you heard of a sleepy little office-park suburb called Mountain View? Maybe Mountain View would like your business instead.
