Not all of the tickets for this year's Virgin Mobile FreeFest are gone.
Nearly 2,500 of the tickets for the free festival at Merriweather Post Pavilion will be available starting Thursday - for a good deed.
At a news conference Tuesday morning, festival organizers and Howard County officials will unveil the Summer of Service, a statewide initiative that trades an act of community service for a FreeFest ticket.
A Web site will be launched Thursday that lets people apply to do volunteer work in Howard County - such as giving blood, cleaning up public parks or painting barns. In return, they will gain access to the Aug. 30 festival, which features headliners Blink-182, Weezer and Public Enemy. The Web site, which has been given a pool of 2,400 tickets, will eventually be expanded to include nonprofit organizations from around the state.
"We're trying to get people to dedicate themselves to volunteering in the community," said Howard County Executive Ken Ulman. "As you might imagine, we want to be very careful that it's managed in a way that actual people who volunteer get the tickets."
Now in its fourth year, the festival started as a ticketed event at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore. Last week, organizers announced their plans to move the festival to Columbia, scale back its scope and make it free - a feat rarely seen in festivals this size. Merriweather will be expanded to hold 35,000 and outfitted with a second stage and a dance tent for the all-day event.
Music fans were stunned at the announcement, and quickly snapped up tickets. As of Monday evening, tickets on the scalping Web site StubHub were selling for as much as $695 each.
"There's a lot of people still looking for tickets," Ulman said. "If this makes one person go volunteer once somewhere, they might like it. They might come back."
