Greed and Selfishness Killed This Town’s Summer Concerts

Brighton — One of the most wonderful things about summertime in Michigan is small-town outdoor concerts.

Music in the Air on Friday nights in Plymouth. Free Fridays in Grand Haven. Kollen Park in Holland. Concerts at the Courthouse in Howell. So many great ones. You pull up a lawn chair, pop open a cold one, and enjoy the sounds of summer. It’s awesome.

Unless you’re in Brighton. One of the state’s truly great summer concert series has been killed, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

Brighton used to be home to one of the best and longest-running summer concert series in the state, the Brighton Kiwanis Club’s Mill Pond Concerts. Since Gerald Ford was in the White House, the Kiwanis Club has served up free summer concerts every Sunday night. Mostly oldies, but a little country and some jazz mixed in as well.

And now, it’s all gone. A combination of greed, selfishness, and stupidity killed it. The Brighton Kiwanis Club recently announced that it was forced to cancel its 2026 concert series, because they don’t have a place to hold it.

They Kiwanians desperately want to keep the concerts going, but they don’t have a home. Sunday nights in Brighton will be quiet and lonely, and when you hear the story of how it all came down, you’ll be just as infuriated as the people in Brighton are right now.

First, indulge me a little personal background. For many years, I was the editor of the newspaper in Brighton, so I know the town, the people, and the history quite well. I also know the general attitude of the city leaders in Brighton, and the best word to describe it is “uppity.” The people in Brighton are awesome. The people who run Brighton are snobby.

As you’re about to find out, that helps describe why the Brighton Kiwanis Club had to cancel one of the things that made Brighton so great.

The story starts in 1976, when a Brighton Kiwanis Club member named Dennis Dimoff had the idea that a Sunday night concert series at the Mill Pond would be a really cool thing. Fifty years later, Dimoff is still around, and he’s still running the concert series, and he’s the hero in this story.

The concerts were an immediate hit, and they became part of the summertime fabric of the community. The Kiwanis Club built a gazebo at the Mill Pond, and the bands would set up underneath it and perform. People would line up on both sides of the Mill Pond to listen to the music, and it was glorious. Thousands of people came into town every Sunday night to enjoy it all.

At some point, they added a classic car show as well. The city agreed to close Main Street, and classic cars would all be parked with their hoods up so that people could check out the hardware. Vendors would sell ice cream and hot dogs and pop. The Imagination Station playground was filled with kids. All while a band rocked out to Chuck Berry or Jimmy Buffett or whatever. It was Michigan at its finest.

And then, Brighton being Brighton, they had to ruin everything.

In 2018, the Brighton City Council got the bright idea that it had to spend $739,500 of taxpayer money to tear down the Kiwanis Club’s perfectly good gazebo and replace it with a gorgeous, state-of-the-art facility that would be called the AMP (short for amphitheater).

Never mind that everybody was totally happy with everything the way it was, and literally nobody in Brighton was asking for a new amphitheater that cost three-quarters-of-a-million dollars. We know best, the city council said.

Mind you, this is the same Brighton City Council that a few years earlier spent $15,000 to buy a statue of an ugly naked guy that everybody hated. They put that at the Mill Pond too.

In any case, when the extravagant new AMP opened in 2019, the city told the Kiwanis Club that it was going to have to start paying big money to rent it. Not only that, but they were also going to have to pay even more money to close Main Street for the classic car show.

The total bill for the summer was going to be $19,000. The Kiwanis Club’s entire budget for the concert series was $22,000. That left them just $3,000 to hire the bands for the entire summer.

The national Kiwanis Club, in case you’re wondering, is a wonderful community service organization that was founded in Detroit in 1915 and has chapters all over the world. It’s a club made up of community-minded individuals who try to make the world better, “one child and one community at a time.”

They are not, despite what the Brighton City Council thinks, made of money. So when the city told them to pay up or hit the road, they had no choice but to hit the road. They left their longtime home at the Mill Pond and moved down the street to Brighton High School, where they were welcomed with open arms.

It worked out great. They set up a stage for the bands over by the football field and the classic cars showed up and Sunday nights in Brighton were rockin’ once again.

And then another villain showed up.

As it turns out, back in 2011, when the Brighton High School athletic complex was being expanded, the Brighton School Board signed an agreement with the homeowners’ association at Pine Creek Ridge, a ritzy subdivision right next door to the high school.

The agreement said that the school district agreed to not allow any non-school events on Sundays at the athletic complex. The upper-crusters over at Pine Creek Ridge didn’t want anything to disturb their peace on Sunday evenings, so they got the school board to sign the deal.

The current superintendent and school board at Brighton weren’t around in 2011 and didn’t know anything about this. And apparently it took a few years for Pine Creek Ridge to remember that they had this signed agreement in the file cabinet, so in January of this year, Pine Creek Ridge called the superintendent and told him they were going to start enforcing the agreement.

The superintendent called Dimoff and said sorry, we can’t let you hold your concerts at Brighton High School anymore.

So they can’t hold the concerts at the Mill Pond because it’s too expensive. They can’t hold them at the high school because the next-door neighbors don’t want to listen to oldies music for two hours every Sunday. It was too late to even think of finding someplace else in Brighton that might work.

When the news broke that the concert series was canceled, people in Brighton were certainly pissed, but they were mostly just bitterly disappointed. Their Sunday nights were now ruined. And they took to Facebook to express their feelings.

Someone named Char Kay wrote, “Ridiculous. Isn’t this why we have the AMP to begin with? And a subdivision doesn’t like it? They hear football games and bands so why not music? Brighton better figure this out.”

Well, unfortunately, Brighton isn’t figuring it out. They tore down a perfectly fine venue and replaced it with a Taj Mahal that nobody can afford. The AMP is hosting a series of much smaller concerts on Thursday nights, as well as some guy-with-a-guitar singers on Saturdays, but it’s not the same as the Kiwanis Club’s Sunday concerts and car shows.

What needs to happen is that Brighton needs to stop being Brighton and they need to tell the Kiwanis Club that, in 2027, they can come back to the Mill Pond for free and they’ll close Main Street for the classic car shows and we’ll just go back to the way it was.

But don’t hold your breath.