If you’ve been organizing your 2009 summer vacation around Pemberton Festival, you can officially start making alternative plans.

Live Nation president of touring and business development Shane Bourbonnais has told the Straight that there will be no Pemberton Festival this year.

“We’ve had some conversations internally this week, and we’ve decided to focus on 2010 for the return of the festival,” Bourbonnais said in an interview. “We’re not comfortable with where we’re at right now in planning and talent acquisition. And we really want to make sure that when we do bring the festival back, we don’t come back with the same problems that we had last year.”

The inaugural festival saw music fans from around the globe converge on Pemberton for a three-day July 2008 package featuring heavy-hitting headliners like Coldplay, Jay-Z, Nine Inch Nails, and Tom Petty. Each day drew an estimated 40,000 fans. The event was a huge success from an artistic standpoint, garnering glowing reviews in publications such as Rolling Stone and Spin. There were, however, organizational problems, including large traffic jams near the site, as well as overflowing toilets.

In November 2008, Live Nation, the event’s promoter, cleared a major hurdle in securing the site for future concerts. The B.C. Agricultural Land Commission approved an application for the site, which is on farmland. Still, Bourbonnais said there isn’t time to pull off Pemberton 2009. He noted that planning for the 2008 edition of the festival began in September 2007.

“In the fall [of 2008], right after the event, the plan was definitely to go with an event next year,” he said. “But there were permitting issues that delayed us from getting up and going, and we really didn’t want to start securing talent not knowing that we had the go-ahead for 2009. That put us behind in talent acquisition, and also in sponsorship, and also in being able to line up the proper people to help us work through festival problems like traffic. We had a guy lined up that’s probably one of the best traffic guys in North America. Unfortunately, we had to let him go because we couldn’t sign him up—he had other contracts.

“It was a multitude of things,” Bourbonnais continued. “This week, we sat around and said, ‘Can we pull a festival off that will be better than last year’s festival?’ The conclusion was ‘We’re not comfortable that we can do it.’ We want to make sure that when we do bring it back, it’s building on 2008 without going backwards.”

He said it’s crucial to build on the legacy of the first Pemberton Festival.

“Seeing how important it was to people and how people are still following it is flattering,” Bourbonnais said. “This project that kind of started as a dream turned into a reality and a great event. The talent was unbelievable and the bands all have fond memories of Pemberton. So do the fans, which is great.”