Each week, Santa Monica Next republishes an article from City Manager Oliver Chi’s newsletter.
In a massively disappointing turn of events, this past Friday, the City and Goldenvoice announced that the inaugural Ocean Way Festival, which had been planned for September 26- 27 on The Beach south of the Pier, will not be taking place this year.
Given all of the work that so many members of our City team put in during the past year to facilitate the event, it still feels surreal that we won’t be hosting the Ocean Way Festival on our beach in just two weeks’ time.
Given how involved we have been as a City organization in developing the event, we wanted to share some details with everyone as it relates to how we ended up cancelling the festival.
Following an assessment conducted after the Labor Day weekend storms, we identified that beach erosion caused by Hurricane Marie, coupled with the timelines that we were dealing with related to the event, created a reality where the Ocean Way Festival would have to be cancelled this year. Of note, both the City and Goldenvoice are already working together to bring the festival back in 2027.
Hurricane Marie, an Eastern Pacific storm that reached Category 2 strength, sent a large south swell into Southern California over Labor Day weekend, along with two days of rain and a High Surf Advisory that ran through September 8. The same conditions caused coastal flooding and property damage in Long Beach and Seal Beach; local emergency declarations in Malibu, Laguna Beach, and Dana Point; and beach erosion up and down the coast.
In Santa Monica, the surf stripped sand from the beach south of the Pier, lowering it and leaving a four-foot erosion shelf at the south end of the festival site. On a lower beach, every tide runs farther inland, and the impacts from the storm meant that we would have had to push the event’s water-side edge 96 feet inland, and the southern boundary of the event roughly 500 feet north.
Either impact alone would have required a fundamental redesign for the festival site. However, taken together, the reduced event site footprint meant that the location could not meet our public safety standards for an event of this size. Further, given that load-in and construction-related activities were set to start on September 15, that left no time to restore the beach and still complete the work of building the festival site.
Of note, our beach is open and safe for everyday use, and the Pier never closed. However, what the site located south of the Pier cannot facilitate right now is a two-week building process, followed by a two-day festival where tens of thousands of people would be interacting with fixed structures anchored in the sand.
Moving ahead, the City is working to compile a complete report this upcoming week with photos, exhibits, and drone footage which will outline further how our beach was impacted.
Further, our tremendous Public Works Department is working on a repair plan to restore the sites on our beach that were impacted by Hurricane Marie, with an eye toward a very big year ahead on our beach. We’ve got ESPN coming for the Super Bowl in early 2027, the return of the Ocean Way Festival next fall, and welcoming the world for the LA28 Olympics in 2028.
A few things to know in the meantime. All tickets purchased for the 2026 Ocean Way Festival will be fully refunded, via an automatic process from the point of purchase. Also, even withou the festival, the City and Goldenvoice intend to move forward this year with many of the community benefit initiatives developed alongside Ocean Way, with additional details coming in the next few days.
While it is extremely disappointing that the Ocean Way Festival was cancelled, you can rest assured that while the surf took the site (at least momentarily), it did not take the partnership we have formed with Goldenvoice or the Realignment Plan we have developed to help revitalize Santa Monica. We’ll be back next year, and given the work of our team, I know it’ll be better than ever.
