Tone Deaf at the Ford: A Fundraiser, a Noise Permit and a 45-Decibel Fight

The owner of the Ford Amphitheater hosted a fundraiser for Mayor Yemi Mobolade on October 22, nine days before the venue’s permit to exceed the city’s noise limits expires. Under city code, that permit is the mayor’s to grant. J.W. Roth, his companies, the company of VENU shareholder Kevin O’Neil and a former VENU board member have already given $101,349 to the mayor and his chief of staff, Wayne Williams, most of it to Williams when he ran against Mobolade in 2023. What the evening raised becomes public on November 2.

Roth’s Sea & Steak is, in its own words, “located above the Ford Amphitheater.” A rooftop bar called Brohan’s sits on top of it. On October 22, KRDO reported, J.W. Roth and his wife, Kilyn Roth, invited guests there for “An Evening with Mayor Yemi.” VENU Holding Corp., the company Roth founded and runs, which owns the amphitheater and the restaurant, told the station it was a fundraiser for the mayor’s re-election.

The mayor is not a bystander to the venue’s noise. The City of Colorado Springs code gives the Mayor the power to grant the “hardship permits” that let an operator exceed the city’s noise limits, and the Ford has held one for every season since it opened in 2024. Yemi Mobolade signed the 2025 agreement with VENU on which the current permit rests. That permit runs out on October 31, and the April 6 election in which Mobolade seeks a second term falls before the next concert season. Roth’s stake in the answer is personal as well as corporate: since June, according to VENU’s filings, he has been co-owner of the land the amphitheater stands on. His campaign money, meanwhile, has gone elsewhere. In the 2023 runoff he and three companies registered at VENU’s headquarters gave $60,000 to Wayne Williams, Mobolade’s opponent, and his company, then called Notes Live, put on a $17,650 event for him. Williams has been Mobolade’s chief of staff since April.

Who grants the permit

The rule is short. City Code § 9.8.109 says applications for relief from the noise limits “on the basis of undue hardship may be made to the Mayor.” The Mayor may grant one if the applicant needs more time to bring its operation into compliance, or if the noise is temporary and cannot be made to comply, and in either case only if “no other reasonable alternative is available.” The Mayor may attach any conditions needed “to minimize adverse effects upon the community.”

In practice the paperwork goes through the Colorado Springs Police Department’s Special Events Unit, under a 2025 administrative regulation by which the mayor delegated the power to issue and deny these permits. The documents still carry his name. The 2025 permit, signed for the department by a sergeant, opens: “The Mayor does hereby approve the application.” The mitigation and monitoring agreement attached to it, under which VENU built new sound walls and installed three more monitoring stations, is signed “Blessing A. Mobolade, Mayor.” The 2026 application states that “the Mayor and the Colorado Springs Police Department” made the required findings, and that the 2025 agreement’s terms carry over to this season.

Those terms are modest. Outside Polaris Pointe, the commercial area around the amphitheater, VENU must keep concert sound at its monitors to the higher of the pre-show background level or 50 A-weighted decibels, averaged over five minutes. If that is exceeded by 6 decibels at two or more of the five monitors during a show, VENU owes the city $500. The city says no penalty has been triggered.

This year’s application added a nonprofit, the Venu Arts & Culture Foundation, to the applicants alongside the promoter AEG Presents and VENU’s Sunset Operations, after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last year that a municipal permit does not exempt a for-profit venue from the state’s noise law. The foundation’s articles of incorporation, attached to the application, show it was formed in February 2024 as the Notes Live Foundation. Its incorporator and registered agent is J.W. Roth, at VENU’s office on Telstar Drive.

What the rules allow

Colorado Springs puts no limit on how much anyone may give a city candidate, and corporations may give, the City Clerk’s campaign finance guidance says. The city’s code of ethics bars officials from accepting gifts tied to their duties but exempts “a campaign contribution as defined by law,” provided it “could not be reasonably considered a bribe or a means of improper influence on a direct official action.” Issuing a permit is a direct official action under the code’s definitions.

The code also describes an “appearance of impropriety”: a direct official action that “will or may create a reasonable perception” that an official’s impartiality is impaired. It lets an official in that position step aside, or declare, in writing or at a public meeting, that he will act impartially. It does not require either.

Councilmember Dave Donelson, who said this month that he will run for mayor, called the fundraiser a conflict of interest. “When citizens look at the mayor receiving a fundraiser by the person who’s going to ask for that waiver, I think it again reinforces this idea you can’t trust city government,” he told KRDO. Roth called Donelson “a clown.”

Mobolade’s campaign said the mayor had held “dozens of meet-and-greets and fundraisers” and had been “invited to a fundraising event hosted by JW at Brohan’s Bar,” which it described as a gathering of business owners to hear his plans for small business. The invitation, according to KRDO, gave the venue as Roth’s Sea & Steak. Both are right: Brohan’s is the bar upstairs. VENU told the station that the campaign would disclose the event in its filings, and Mobolade said he was willing to sit down to discuss it.

Roth’s stake

Roth is VENU’s chairman and chief executive and, at 24.5 percent, its largest shareholder, according to the company’s 2026 proxy statement. He now also owns part of the ground. On June 5, a VENU subsidiary sold the 9.5 acres on which the amphitheater stands to O’Neil Roth Ford LLC for $49.7 million and leased the land back. The proxy says that company is “co-owned and co-managed by” Roth and a significant VENU shareholder, and that the amphitheater’s operating company now pays it $4,224,500 a year in rent, up from $3,222,000 under the old lease.

The proxy does not name the other co-owner. It identifies that co-owner only as the shareholder who wholly owns the company that bought the amphitheater’s 5.5-acre parking parcel last November. That buyer was Belmont Manor Apartments LLC, and the purchase agreement, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is signed for it by Kevin O’Neil, managing member. The same proxy lists O’Neil as owner of 8.2 percent of VENU.

The money on file

The Independent read all 18 reports Mobolade’s campaigns have filed with the City Clerk since 2021, the last of them covering the period through September 26 of this year. None lists a contribution from J.W. or Kilyn Roth, from VENU, or from any company the state’s business registry lists at VENU’s office suite, Roth’s Sea & Steak LLC and O’Neil Roth Ford LLC among them. None lists a payment to a VENU business.

Two donors have ties to VENU. The O’Neil Group Company, whose founder and chief executive is Kevin O’Neil, according to its website, gave Mobolade $10,000 on March 21, 2023 and another $10,000 on April 5, the day after the first round. Together that is about 2 percent of the $843,000 in itemized contributions Mobolade reported for the 2023 race. The checks predate the ties between O’Neil and Roth’s company that VENU’s filings describe: a stock option granted to O’Neil in January 2025, a holding of more than 10 percent later that year, and the two land deals. The second donor is a Matthew Craddock, giving the office address of Craddock Development Company, which VENU’s 2025 proxy says its director Matt Craddock runs. He gave $1,557.94 in January 2023, two months before he joined VENU’s board, and $1,566.08 in July of this year, while still on it. He also gave Williams $575 in March 2023, the month he joined the board.

In 2023, Roth’s money went to Mobolade’s opponent. The Roth-linked entries in Wayne Williams’s reports all fall after the first round:

Williams lost. In April he joined Mobolade’s administration as chief of staff, the mayor’s liaison to the City Council and to the heads of city departments. Mobolade began his re-election campaign the same week. Williams started on April 20, fifteen days before the 2026 permit was issued; the records the city has posted do not show whether he had any part in it.

Taken together, Roth, his companies, the O’Neil Group and Craddock have given $101,349 to the mayor and his chief of staff: $78,225 to Williams and $23,124 to Mobolade. Through September 26, Roth himself had given Mobolade’s campaigns nothing.

The 45-decibel argument

Roth has been making his case in public as well. On October 9 he wrote a column in the Gazette against two proposed city ordinances now gathering signatures for the April ballot. One would end hardship permits for events that are not free; the other would bar new projects whose noise is “detrimental to the quiet enjoyment” of homes nearby. Both turn on 45 decibels, which Roth called “roughly the hum of your dishwasher or a light rain.” Such a city, he concluded, would be “living in a library.” He was candid about his stake. “Isn’t the guy who built the Ford Amphitheater a little biased?” he asked. “Absolutely.”

The comparison leaves out where the sound is measured. Roth’s dishwasher hums in the kitchen. The petition’s 45, as KRDO reported its terms, is a ten-minute average of noise from a commercial, industrial or entertainment source, taken at the boundary of a residential property, with a ceiling of 55. It is the concert as it arrives, not as it leaves the stage.

Nor is 45 new to the city. The code already sets residential limits of 55 decibels by day and 50 at night, and declares “periodic, impulsive, or shrill” noises unlawful at 5 decibels below those, which makes 45 at night. Whether concert music counts as periodic has never been tested; a consultant hired by residents has argued that it does.

The closest comparison comes from VENU’s own file. In 2022, when the company was still Notes Live and seeking approval, its acoustic consultant, LSTN, modeled the sound at homes 3,500 feet to the northeast. With full mitigation, it predicted 47 A-weighted decibels, a figure that became the venue’s public commitment. The dishwasher, in other words, is roughly what Roth’s own consultant forecast for the neighbors.

The same table shows what the A-weighted number leaves out. A-weighting discounts low notes by design, as the Independent has explained, and LSTN’s prediction for those homes was 21 decibels at 2,000 hertz but 66 decibels at 63 hertz, in the bass. “Low frequency sounds are the hardest to reduce at distance,” the report says. The petition sets a separate limit of 50 decibels at 63 hertz. Bass is what the amphitheater’s neighbors describe hearing through closed windows; a dishwasher’s hum is not.

Roth’s comparisons describe sound where it is made. The petition, the city’s code and his own consultant’s table describe it where it lands. Two letters to the Gazette made similar points four days later. One, from Ron Graham-Becker, called the column’s examples “rhetorical noise.”

What happens next

The 2026 permit expires on October 31. Mobolade’s next campaign report, covering September 27 to October 26 and so the fundraiser, is due at the City Clerk’s office on November 2. The petitioners need more than 25,000 valid signatures by December 7 to reach the April 6 ballot, on which Mobolade faces at least four challengers, Donelson among them. The Ford’s last two permits were issued in late January 2025 and early May 2026. The election falls between those dates, so the next permit will come from Mobolade’s office or from whoever replaces him.

Following the permit

Put the dates in order and the pattern needs little help. In 2023 Roth and his companies backed Williams with $77,650, and O’Neil’s company gave $20,000 to Mobolade, the man who won. Williams now works for him as chief of staff. Counting a former VENU director’s smaller gifts to both men, the total from Roth, O’Neil and Craddock to the mayor and his chief of staff is $101,349. Roth gave Mobolade’s campaigns nothing while the mayor’s office granted the Ford three hardship permits. Now, with the third due to lapse in nine days and an election less than six months off that will decide who grants the fourth, he has hosted a fundraiser for the mayor in a restaurant above the amphitheater. Since June he has co-owned the land the amphitheater stands on.

None of this shows that a permit was bought. Campaign contributions in Colorado Springs are legal and unlimited, the 2026 permit repeats the 2025 terms, and the city says no penalty was triggered in the seasons it has reported. But the city’s ethics code does not ask whether influence was bought. It asks whether an official action may create “a reasonable perception” that an official’s impartiality is impaired. Roth’s money and O’Neil’s reached both candidates in 2023; this fall the mayor raised money in Roth’s restaurant. The money has followed the office that grants the Ford’s permit, and that creates the perception the code describes. The code lets the mayor answer it by stepping aside from the Ford’s next permit, or by declaring in public that he will judge it fairly. It requires neither.

What the evening raised is due at the City Clerk’s office on November 2.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: All About That Bass — why A-weighted limits discount the low notes neighbors hear · At the Ford Amphitheater, the Complaints Track the Wind — how the venue was approved, and the 47-decibel commitment · The Forecast Said High. The Map Logged Five Reports. — the most recent show the Independent examined · Follow the Money: Buc-ee’s, the Ford Amphitheater Network, and the 2026 Commissioner Races — Roth and O’Neil money in county races.

City record: City Code § 9.8.109, hardship permits, with §§ 9.8.104 and 9.8.106 · City Code of Ethics, § 1.3.111 and following and § 1.3.102, definitions · Noise hardship permit NHP 2025-004 and the 2025 mitigation and monitoring agreement · 2026 noise hardship permit application · City announcement of the 2026 permit, May 6, 2026 · Ford Amphitheater project page · LSTN Consultants, environmental noise assessment for Notes Live, September 13, 2022.

Campaign finance and corporate records: City Clerk campaign finance system — Yemi Mobolade’s 18 reports, 2021–2026, and Wayne Williams’s 2022–23 reports · City Clerk campaign finance FAQ · Colorado Secretary of State business registry · VENU Holding Corp. proxy statement, August 21, 2026 — ownership table and related-party transactions, including the Ford land sale · VENU Form 8-K, November 10, 2025, and the parking-parcel purchase agreement with Belmont Manor Apartments LLC · VENU Form 8-K, June 2, 2025, describing the restaurant and Brohan’s · The O’Neil Group Company.

Reporting and commentary: KRDO, “An Evening with Mayor Yemi,” October 23, 2026 · KRDO, on the petition’s thresholds, September 3, 2026 · The Gazette, on the four petitions, September 2, 2026 · J.W. Roth, “Proposed noise limits threaten events and city’s development,” the Gazette, October 9, 2026 · Letters to the Gazette, October 13, 2026 · The Gazette, on the 2026 permit, May 6, 2026 · The Gazette, on Williams’s appointment, April 9, 2026 · The Gazette, on the mayoral field, October 15, 2026.

Methodology

The Independent downloaded every report Yemi Mobolade’s campaigns have filed in the City Clerk’s campaign finance system: 18 reports, 1,377 pages, covering May 7, 2021 to September 26, 2026. Each contribution, in-kind contribution, refund and expenditure was extracted, and the extracted totals were checked against each report’s own summary lines; they matched to the cent for every schedule used. The full list of about 1,900 contributor names, with employers and occupations, was then read in full, along with all 229 payees. The 58 contributors that are companies or trusts were checked against the Colorado Secretary of State’s business registry for a principal address or registered agent at VENU’s office (1755 Telstar Drive, Suite 501) or for an agent named Roth. Wayne Williams’s 15 reports for the 2023 race were read the same way for the entries cited.

The checks cover direct contributions to the candidate committees. They do not cover independent expenditure or political committees, or anything given after September 26, 2026. A contribution made under a name that gives no clue to its source and is registered elsewhere would not have been caught. Companies are tied to VENU here only by their registered address and agent, as recorded by the state.

The $101,349 total is $77,650 from Roth and companies registered at VENU’s office and $575 from Matthew Craddock to Williams, and $20,000 from the O’Neil Group and $3,124.02 from Craddock to Mobolade. The O’Neil Group’s checks and Craddock’s first gift to Mobolade predate their documented ties to VENU. The identification of the Matthew Craddock who gave to Mobolade and Williams with VENU’s director rests on his name and on the office address he gave, which the state registry records for Craddock Development Company, the firm VENU’s 2025 proxy says he runs.

VENU’s 2026 proxy does not name the co-owner of O’Neil Roth Ford LLC. It describes that person as the significant shareholder who wholly owns the buyer of the parking parcel; VENU’s November 2025 Form 8-K names that buyer as Belmont Manor Apartments LLC, and the purchase agreement filed with it is signed for Belmont Manor by Kevin O’Neil as managing member. The Independent read the proxy’s related-party section in full and its ownership table with the footnotes cited here, not the whole document.

The petitions’ terms are as KRDO reported them from the filed text. The Independent has not obtained the filed text itself. LSTN’s 47-decibel figure is a model prediction for one location with a 100-decibel front-of-house level, not a measurement; the permitted front-of-house limit is 105 decibels. The 2026 permit document the city posted is the application package and does not show who signed the issued permit.

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