The Hawaii County Windward Planning Commission on Thursday will decide the fate of the “Falls on Fire” Festival — a controversial “Burning Man”-inspired gathering in Papaikou hosted by Pennsylvania video game executive Andrew Tepper.
The event has drawn hundreds of people to Tepper’s 1,400-acre property along the Hamakua Coast north of Hilo every November for the past three years. There, attendees participate in fire dancing, light and art installations, live music and DJ performances, healing and wellness activities, and workshops on topics like permaculture, sustainable building and environmental activism.
It’s a four-day-long celebration culminating in the ceremonial burning of a “symbolic effigy” in an homage to the weeklong spectacle held annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in late August and early September that’s become world famous among counterculture types — Burning Man.
But complaints from neighbors and a lack of proper permitting has threatened to shut the festival down. For violations stemming from the 2023 festival, Tepper was issued a Notice of Violation Order from the county’s Planning Department levying thousands of dollars in fines for hosting unpermitted events.
In September 2024, Tepper hired Land Planning Hawaii to apply for a special use permit with two main components. The first sought to legitimize that year’s festival with camping for up to 500 attendees, while the second component — unrelated to the event — sought authorization to store commercial vehicles on the property.
Tepper leases a large section of the land containing the festival site to a local rancher during the rest of the year, who uses its pastures to graze cattle. The tenant uses a half-acre section of the property for storing several commercial vehicles and pieces of heavy equipment, which the planning director has characterized as a “heavy equipment rental base yard.”
The county repeatedly warned Tepper to refrain from holding the 2024 festival until the special permit was issued, but he proceeded anyway, throwing “Falls on Fire” from Nov. 8 to 11 that year with roughly 200 attendees. Hosting both the 2023 and 2024 events left him with $34,000 in county fines for violations involving camping, amplified sound and advertising on property zoned for agricultural use.
For the 2025 festival, Tepper threw yet another gathering even while the permitting process was still pending, opting to call it a “private” event this time and refusing to allow county inspectors onto the property while festivities were underway.
A contested case hearing regarding the permit’s issuance was held on Nov. 13, 2025, in Hilo, instigated by neighbors James McMahon and his wife, Lichuan Huang, who were fed up with the constant heavy truck noise and annual blitz of traffic, trespassing and loud music.
The planning commission will review the hearings officer’s findings Thursday, and make a decision whether to approve or deny the permit, and — if approved — lay out conditions that must be met for the festival’s 2026 iteration to proceed.
Concerns from neighbors
McMahon and Huang were the “intervenors” in the contested case. Their home lies roughly 30 feet away from a road easement running through their farm that provides access to the festival site and the “heavy equipment rental base yard.” This sends a steady stream of trucks right past their living room, which they say is more bothersome than the event itself.
“Our house is almost constantly shaking from all the activity,” McMahon told the Tribune-Herald. “People don’t realize the ground here shakes a lot because we’re on deep soil — the roads and the homes here are not anchored in bedrock, they’re basically floating on soil. Any pounding from heavy trucks going up the road kind of reverberates around, and that’s a concern for us because of the possible damage to our foundations, for example.”
During those handful of days in November, the road is even more active, with dozens of cars belonging to festival attendees driving back and forth at all hours of the day.
“Anything that takes place on his properties has a direct impact on us simply due to the traffic,” McMahon said about Tepper. “The volume of traffic that would be going on there — this is a private road, it’s a single lane, basically a farm road. We’re actually more annoyed by the people who would be going up and down the road and running their boom boxes all night long. We get more noise from that than from the actual event.”
Even so, the couple can still hear the festival’s sound system from inside their house, which disturbed their sleep until just before dawn during the event’s first year.
“My guess is about four to five AM,” McMahon said when asked what time the music finally quit in 2023. “I mean it’s all night … a lot of their events take place all night long, and I know they basically recommend for their attendees to wear earplugs if they want to get some sleep.”
However, the 2024 festival wasn’t as loud for them, he said.
“Our experience has varied from year to year,” he said. “The first year was really bad. The second year, though, it got better. I understand that they redirected the speakers — they were having the speakers point mauka toward the mountain instead of down towards the sea where we are — but we could still hear it.”
Huang clarified that they don’t have a problem with the festival itself, just its venue.
“I personally don’t even oppose the proposed activity. The question is whether the location is appropriate or not,” she said. “And I totally understand that it’s beneficial for certain people, and I fully support it. It’s just we don’t believe the location right off of our farm is the best place to be. The contested case is really because we have the easement concern — whether the main access route can support the proposed project.”
McMahon shared this sentiment, saying that hosting the event in a quiet, agricultural neighborhood is inappropriate and degrades their quality of life.
“All around us is farms, it’s agricultural land,” he said. “Most people live on their farms, so it’s not just a farm or a place of work, it’s actually where we live. So it’s our lifestyle for us that’s the biggest concern.”
In addition to those issues, he said the festival’s organizer hasn’t been transparent with neighbors from the very start.
“Mr. Tepper has not been candid with us in terms of what his plans were when he purchased this property here,” McMahon said. “He just came in and started doing these things. He didn’t really engage with the community. He didn’t go through the permitting process.”
Even if the planning commission grants the special use permit this month, McMahon said he still has substantial doubts about whether “Falls on Fire” will follow the rules going forward.
“If he does get his permit,” McMahon said, “we have very little confidence that he will abide by the conditions. And then the county has very limited resources to actually investigate and enforce those conditions, so it could easily go out of control.”
After last year’s contested case proceedings, a hearing officer handed downa “findings of fact” in early 2026, where it suggested the special use permit should be granted if Tepper agreed to meet the county’s safety, sanitation and maintenance demands.
A long list of requirements
These included only hosting the event once per year, limiting attendance to no more than 500 people, requiring the commercial vehicle yard to store no more than six pieces of heavy equipment, providing on-site parking for all attendees, and building pull-off and passing areas along the graveled, one-lane Indian Tree Road leading to the festival site.
It also requires Tepper to pay $10,000 per year to repair the road, submit notifications to neighbors and the planning, police and fire departments, and secure written approval from the Department of Health for any open burning, which would be revocable during active “no burn periods.”
The road requirements tie in with the fire and police department notification: Since the road is one-lane and narrow, neighbors have expressed concern that an emergency at the festival could quickly turn into blocked access.
“A lot of these areas only have one way in and one way out, so even if the fire department gets onto the road, maybe if it’s a real disaster you may have people trying to go and making it virtually impossible for them to get in there,” McMahon said. “If you’re in a situation where you’re dealing with a lot of traffic already — people coming out, coming in, whatever — that’s going to impede the response time.”
Then there’s the wildfire risk of burning a multistory effigy in a region of the island that frequently experiences droughts — sometimes severely.
“It’s more monsoonal type patterns where you have long dry spells, and you get rain all at once basically, and then everything grows up, all the vegetation grows very thick and lots of times it will dry out and become combustible,” McMahon said.
Other conditions of the special use permit being granted include a 9 p.m. cut-off time for all amplified sound, a requirement to install a minimum 5,000-gallon water tank for fire control, a demand for siting sufficient numbers of portable toilets supplied and serviced by a licensed company, and a condition that all past fines be paid before the 2026 festival can proceed.
Tepper is the co-founder of video game developer eGenesis, and has bought more property on Hawaii Island in the past five years than major landowners like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell, according to reporting by SFGate.
Tepper has spent more than $35 million on real estate on the island since 2021, recently having acquired the 792-acre Kupaianaha Ranch for just over $10 million near the Hilo Forest Reserve boasting waterfalls, orchards, pastureland, and a two-story, 8,542-square-foot log cabin.
Due to the ongoing nature of the contested case, Tepper declined to be interviewed for this story.
Email Stefan Verbano at stefan.verbano@hawaiitribune-herald.
