Not much rattles Melrose, an unincorporated community with a couple thousand residents clustered between Alachua, Putnam, Bradford and Clay counties.

It’s just Lake Santa Fe, State Road 26 headed east to west, and State Road 21 headed north and south.

But in the last year, the Alachua County Board of County Commissioners received more than 595 emails in support and opposition to a proposed Melrose music festival. And dozens lined SR 26 in January to protest.

Something is up, and that something is WildFlowers Music Park.

The yearslong tension will have a formal outlet on Feb. 10 when the Alachua County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) hears a proposal for a temporary use permit (TUP).

The permit will determine if and how the property hosts the 2026 WildFlowers Festival of Music & Dance scheduled for March 13 to 15. It’s also the first time a C-level TUP—the most intensive—has arrived before the county commission since implementing the new tiered system.

Wildflowers Music Park

Robert Hutchinson said WildFlowers Music Park and its volunteers still have a lot of deadlines and details to finish before the festival, and he’s not sure what conditions the BOCC might place on the event.

“Usually, they don’t get denied, but they can add so many conditions that you can’t comply,” Hutchinson said. “We’ve got a lot of things that we’re little surprised they’re making us do that we really don’t see the benefit of, but we’re probably going to end up doing them.”

Hutchinson served on the county commission for three terms, ending in 2020. Now, he’s an investor and managing partner for the music park.

The whole project is really about the land, he said, with the festival as a means to an end: returning the land to natural Florida and creating a 270-acre nature park for the community to enjoy.

The project started as a potential festival expansion for the New York-based GrassRoots organizations before the group pulled out, but a former GrassRoots director and locals have continued the project.

Since acquiring the property in August, the nonprofit and its volunteers have cleared swaths of the land—removing invasive plants and overgrowth that was choking the property’s more than 100 live oaks. They also removed a mound with thousands of floppy discs.

“This is a very unique arrangement to preserve a piece of land,” Hutchinson said.

The fiscal arrangement is a nonprofit charity financed by a separate limited liability company that acts as its bank and coordinates investors. The festival, Hutchinson said, serves as a three-day fundraiser to keep managing the property and paying off the purchase.

But he said the organizers aren’t just dropping an out-of-place EDM festival in rural Florida. He said the music and dance will blend with what already exists in the area, and it won’t be a raucous, all-night affair.

Music performances will end at 10 or 11 p.m. as campers head to tents and RVs and day visitors drive home. The permit said it expects 2,000 attendees this year, with a maximum limit of 5,000 requested.

If the festival continues, the park could apply to have the festival allowed each year instead of needing a TUP every time.

He called a lot of the opposition’s arguments smoke without any real fire.

Hutchinson said the environmental argument, in particular, has been refuted.

WildFlowers Music Park will be an environmental positive, Hutchinson said, especially compared to the land’s previous use and potential for housing. The group has already cleaned up the land and conducted prescribed burns to help build a native Florida landscape.

“In terms of environmental change, this is going to be massive,” he said. “The fertilizers that everybody worries about getting into the lakes, they were pouring on the property. We have a tank up there that you open the lid and it reeks of ammonia from the nitrogen fertilizers they were pouring.”

Trash and debris litter a sinkhole on the property, and Hutchinson said it was used as a dump for years. Volunteers will need to climb down, bag the garbage and hand it person to person out of the hole.

There’s been a strong, coordinated grassroots campaign against it, Hutchinson admits. A large banner hangs on one neighbor’s fence near the park entrance, displaying the “WildFlowers” name crossed out in red with lights for nighttime viewing.

But Hutchinson estimates a good portion of Melrose supports the park or is ambivalent toward it. From discussions, he said of the immediately adjacent neighbors, one third are in support, one third are in opposition and one third are neutral.

“I don’t understand what their vision is,” Hutchinson said. “I understand what the vision on our side is, and that’s a natural space where community meets to enjoy their culture. Because there’s no better community in Alachua County for music and dance than Melrose.”

Without a preservation and festival organization in control, Hutchinson said the land would be open for a housing development. He said 50 to 100 homes would bring more year-round traffic, noise and environmental impacts.

But housing is coming, he pointed out. The Putnam County side of Melrose continues to see developments, and the other corners of Melrose will also fill in.

When that happens, Hutchinson said the community will be glad there’s a 270-acre park within it all. And especially a park that works to restore quickly disappearing native Florida habitat for indigo snakes, chuck-will’s-widow and gopher tortoises.

Connecting Melrose

Opponents to the festival formed Connecting Melrose, an informational website about the area and potential festival, and planted opposition signs across the area. Local resident Sandra Gottschalk hopes the permit isn’t a done deal.

“I think entitlement is a good word for selling tickets before you have a temporary use permit and assuming that this is a done deal when it’s not,” she said. “We have over 1,000 signatures [on our petition], and I think that should count for something.”

Gottschalk, 61, helped start Connecting Melrose and, for 23 years, she’s lived on the west side of Lake Melrose. She said she can sit on her back porch and hear music almost two miles away from Chiappini’s Music Venue.

Now less than a quarter mile from the WildFlowers Music Park, Gottschalk has concerns about the impacts the park could have on traffic, the environment and noise. And she doesn’t believe they will be one-time issues with just the annual festival, despite what park advocates claim.

“I understand if it was, as they said, and this was going to be a one-time event, you know? I can see where people would say, ‘Oh, that’s not that bad,’” she said. “But put this in your backyard and see if you want to listen to it.”

At the project’s first town hall, Gottschalk said she signed up for notifications in case of a prescribed burn on the property. But on the day when owners performed a 75-acre burn, she said communication was silent.

“I’m out there working in my yard and ashes are coming on my head,” Gottschalk said. “I mean, they could have just walked over here and said something to me, so at least I would have known, you know. I’m glad I was home. The communication is terrible.”

Gottschalk said traffic will be affected during the music festival and all other times of the year. Smaller events will bring traffic, or the owning nonprofit could try to open a campground all year instead of just the 400-space maximum requested for the festival.

Just those 400 campgrounds for the festival would make it the largest campground in the area. The permit application also includes a maintenance of traffic plan, special event permit with fire rescue and an application for a limited-use public water system (using the property’s well for drinking water).

Gottschalk called the narrative of WildFlowers saving the environment from development “fearmongering.”

She said the land, permeated with wetlands, sinkholes and hundreds of gopher tortoises, only has enough room for 16 homes, considering the zoning with one house per five acres—better environmentally than 172 RVs at WildFlowers.

Gottschalk added that the demand to buy large tracts of land for one house is high enough to deter the threat of development. For anyone saying the festival would be better for the land than the farming it once was used for, Gottschalk disagreed with that, too.

“The guy that was here before was a farmer, and he did hay fields,” she said. “I don’t see where they’re talking about all these pesticides and everything. Farmers don’t spray a bunch of pesticides and over-fertilize, or else it’ll kill what they’re growing. So I totally disagree with that.”

Even though WildFlowers started selling tickets before securing its temporary use permit, Gottschalk said she has hope that the Feb. 10 application outcome isn’t already decided. After looking at the project carefully, she’s optimistic the BOCC will see conflicts in the park with Alachua County’s comprehensive plan.