Thursday’s Homecoming Weekend concert — featuring Pretty Lights, Wale and Big Gigantic — has been relocated from the Binghamton University Events Center to the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena in Downtown Binghamton.
The Events Center, the planned venue for the show, still shelters more than 100 people evacuated after flooding on Sept. 8, rendering it incapable of hosting the event. The West Gym, the only other on-campus option, is not equipped to host the 2,600 people who have already purchased tickets for the show.
The arena is located at 1 Stuart St. off State Street, near the University Downtown Center. The section of Susquehanna Street that connects Washington Street and State Street on the arena’s south side will be closed for the evening to allow buses to drop off students, said Catherine Cornell, Student Association vice president for programming.
There will be five Off Campus College Transport blue buses specifically designated to ferry students directly to the arena for free, according to Cornell. The buses will start leaving from the front of the Old University Union at 5 p.m. and will continue making runs from campus to the arena throughout the show. Doors at the concert will open at 6 p.m.
Cornell acknowledged that transportation to the show may be logistically challenging, but she stressed that the Student Association Programming Board will make sure to get all students who purchased tickets to the show for free.
“Whether it be a yellow school bus, or a blue school bus, or if we have to call Gordy and Raz and get cabs for everyone, people will get there for free,” Cornell said, referring to providing local taxi service to students.
Pretty Lights, an electronic act that will headline Thursday’s show, had no problem with the venue change, according to Cornell.
“They’re aware of it, they totally understand,” Cornell said, referring to the organizers of the Pretty Lights tour. “They’re more excited about being in the arena, because it’s just going to be huge.”
A press release provided by the University yesterday indicated that there are still about 115 evacuees housed in the Events Center. Of these, 50 have “special medical needs.”
Yesterday evening, BU spokeswoman Gail Glover said in an email that the University is committed to helping evacuees.
“We continue to work with local and federal agencies who are in the process of finding appropriate placement for the evacuees, many of whom lived in areas that were particularly devastated by the flooding,” Glover wrote.
There is currently no set timeline for moving the evacuees to new housing.
Eric Backlund, director of the Events Center, said it would have taken 36 hours to properly clean the Events Center, if the evacuees could have been moved.
“We would do the same kind of cleaning we would do after a concert,” Backlund said.
Cornell said that about 300 student tickets are still available for $20, but the 5,000 person maximum capacity for the show has not changed.
Student and public tickets will be sold at the Events Center box office and on its website until noon on Thursday, though Backlund said his office will continue to sell tickets at the arena’s door before the show Thursday evening.
According to Cornell, the switch from the Events Center to the Arena will be “expensive,” but no SAPB events will be directly affected by moving the event off campus.
“It might be hard to get another Drake this year,” Cornell noted. “We’re not going to cancel Spring Fling, we’re not going to cancel Frost Fest, we’re not going to cancel any of those [Binghamton Underground Music Presents] shows.”
When the SAPB hosts a show at the Events Center, it does not pay rent for the venue, according to Backlund. He said the SAPB pays the “direct cost — the set up and tear down” of the show.
For the concert at the arena, the SAPB will have to pay rent on top of direct cost.
Though he could not confirm the exact added cost, Adam Sebag, a junior majoring in biology and SAPB concert chair, said that the difference “isn’t significant.”
The problem, according to Cornell, is that the SAPB was already “in the red” at the start of the year. She said that her office started the semester $20,000 in debt, with a $240,000 annual budget.
“Money was tight when we came in,” Cornell said.
When asked whether Thursday’s concert would prove to be the SAPB’s biggest show of the year, she was not sure.
“It depends on how many tickets we sell,” she said.