Promoter Lou Medrano has responded to the recent controversy surrounding payments for bands who participated in Seattle Soundfest. Medrano posted a length statement to Facebook and some excerpts note:

We didn't have enough cash to pay the bands. Its that simple…. When we started putting this together we had our many doubts. We didn't know if we would be able to cover all of our expenses, but we were confident that people would turn out for our event. I know that sounds a bit naïve and it definitely was on our part, but before we come off like a bunch of ignorant fools I'd like to mention that we still took precautions and looked into loans, which we were able to get from some AMAZING individuals. The problem was that the loans weren't large enough. We tried getting bank loans, but no one was going to loan us money for a punk festival especially in this economy, and we tried every other route that we could think of to help us financially in case we didn't get the turnout we were looking for and on top of that many of our sponsors went from telling us that they would be giving us a large amount in sponsor dollars to a much smaller amount which put us in an even worse place as we had depended on that money.

Medrano addresses the issues brought up by Seattle Weekly, including what they claim are issues with Shawn Stern of BYO Records/Punk Rock Bowling and issues with Jello Biafra who was cited throughout the Seattle Weekly article.