City Enacts New Noise Control Ordinance

According to this article in the SFGate, The City has enacted a new noise control ordinance for the first time since 1973. The interesting part is down toward the bottom of the article:

Noise violations would become infractions instead of misdemeanor offenses, which officials believe will make enforcement easier. The city's Entertainment Commission would for the first time have authority to regulate low-frequency bass and drum noise.

The EC has been complaining for a while now that they don't have any real enforcement tools, but I wonder exactly how this is going to play out. I think this does not bode well, for example, for Club 6, and gives any neighbor a way to harass other clubs out of existence.

Ken Garcia Attacks Entertainment Commission and Gets it All Wrong

In Friday's edition of The Examiner Ken Garcia penned a hit piece on the San Francisco Entertainment Commission, taking, not surprisingly, the view that the EC should be disbanded and control over clubs and permits returned to the police. His angle for making this argument is that a new club is trying to start up in the North Beach space formerly occupied by The Zebra Club, a club that had significant problems in the past, and the EC is "going against" the neighborhood by supporting the new club. He goes on to question the EC's effectiveness, saying that they have never taken any action against a problematic club, and they have never turned down a permit application.

Of course, what Garcia doesn't get into is the fact that he is arguing for the obstruction of business development, and a type of business that is essential to The City's tourism industry. He makes no suggestion about what kind of business should take over a club space, aside from a club, and seems to have the idea that letting the police take control of a significant business sector, one with which they have a overt conflict of interest, would be a good idea.

Fortunately, it's easy enough to rebut Garcia by simply reading the minutes of the EC meetings. If you take the time to look at what the EC actually does, you can see that they are in the very difficult situation of trying to regulate an entire industry with very little in the way of legislative or administrative support. And if you look at the way they deal with problem clubs, their solution is to try and get them in line with the way things should be done, rather than immediately closing them down. For example, the minutes from the January 15 meeting show quite clearly how the EC attempted to deal with a problem club, Loft 11. They took on the responsibility of checking out the situation for themselves, working with the police to observe actual violations, confronted the Manager and owners on the scene, called them into the EC to defend themselves, and then read them the riot act to make them clean up their act. Rather than taking the simple-minded authoritarian approach that violations mean the permits should be pulled and the business shut down, the EC actually tried to make it a better business. Somehow, I don't think the police would take the same approach.

Nightlife is an essential part of San Francisco's tourist industry, and provides a substantial revenue stream for The City and everyone involved in the industry. The EC has taken the position that nightlife does represent a real industry, and that there is a need to regulate that industry and enforce standards and practices. As we've seen in the past, the police simply regard nightlife as a public nuisance, and thus treat any issue as reasonable grounds for shutting down a club. Before anybody gets the idea that it would be a good idea to let the police once again control permits, maybe it would be worthwhile to consider the actual economic and cultural benefits of an approach that focuses on making businesses better rather than closing them down.

Upcoming Event: San Francisco Charter Amendment for Nightlife at the Entertainment Commission, Tuesday May 6

A movement is afoot to amend the Charter of the City San Francisco with a section that will describe nightlife as an essential part of The City's culture, and require that preservation of nightlife be made part of San Francisco's Master Plan for Development - for example, no more condo development in SoMa without consideration of how those developments will relate to existing nightclubs. At this Tuesday's meeting of the Entertainment Commission the proposed amendment will be introduced for eventual consideration by the Board of Supervisors. This is a great time to come out and show your support for street fairs and nightlife, and it's a very interesting experience to see how your City government operates and who all the players are.

More info coming at www.savesfculture.com.

Entertainment Commission Meeting on Promoter Permits, Tuesday April 1

The new promoter permits I've been writing about are coming up on the agenda for tomorrow's meeting of the Entertainment Commission, and the floor will be open for members of the public to make comments (there's a three-minute time limit). The meeting is at 4PM at City Hall, Room 263. If you have an interest in this you should come attend the hearing, and if you are concerned about how this legislation will affect San Francisco nightlife, you should stand up and make your voice heard. There's a good chance we can get this legislation killed before it ever makes it to a board vote, but we need to make it clear to all parties concerned that there is broad-based opposition to it, and that it will have significant, unintended negative effects on the city's culture.

Entertainment Commission and Cops Set to Square Off Over Club Violence

The Crime section of SFGate is running an article with the rather alarmist title "Summit Aims to Stem Bloodshed at SF Clubs" that is less interesting for the facts it reports - two shootings outside local clubs during New Year's Eve (and what was the party at the 9th Street warehouse, anybody got any tips?) and two cases of assault - than it is for what happens further down the column, when the police begin to complain that, because of the Entertainment Commission, they have less leeway in dealing with violence in clubs.

As Robert Davis, the executive director of the Entertainment Commission, points out in the article, the police are fully empowered to issue citations whenever they want, but they don't have the authority to impose new rules on clubs and bars, which is under the purview of the Commission. That's the real issue - when the police were responsible for regulating clubs, their basic solution was to close everything down, which is what led to the formation of the San Francisco Late Night Coalition and the Entertainment Commission. Reading between the lines of this article, it seems that the police are jockeying for a change that would return the authority for regulating clubs back to them.

What's really interesting, though, is the statement made by the police spokesman Sgt. Steve Mannina, who says "One of the common threads we see is that violence is happening very close to closing time or after." Strange, the same problem was plaguing England when they had a mandatory pub closing time of midnight, and then, when they liberalized the licensing laws, studies showed that there was a significant drop-off in violence.

Most of the chowderheads who commented on this article seem to think that the solution is more police, but maybe the real solution is to let San Francisco become a 24-hour city; then you wouldn't be dumping everyone, in whatever condition, into the streets all at the same time. One of the more insightful comments is that we no longer have a real club district that would make it easy for regular patrols to keep an eye on things; indeed, as gentrification has come to SoMa, it's forced clubs to exist in isolated pockets, often in pretty sketchy locales. Maybe liberalization of closing hours and zoning would do more to improve the overall vibe than throwing more cops (and more money) at the problem.

More on the Halloween Mess and the Dismal State of the Entertainment Commission

Yesterday's Bay Area Reporter has a detailed account of how the hand-off of Halloween to the Entertainment Commission failed in a huge, distressing way. Given the Civil Grand Jury report on the Entertainment Commission that came out in July, which I reported on here, this doesn't come as a huge surprise. The upshot of the article is that the Entertainment Commission doesn't have the resources to manage large-scale events, and that the Mayor's Office feels it should only concern itself with the regulation of nightclubs and nightlife (which it also hasn't done such a great job with). The solution proposed is the formation of an Office of Special Events that would deal exclusively and explicity with events like Halloween. I hope this would also extend to street fairs, since, as we've seen in the case of the now-defunct How Weird Street Faire, when it comes down to residents vs. event organizers, the police will always side with the residents, and that's the end of the street faire. However, unless an Office of Special Events turns out to be more effective, and pro-active, than the Entertainment Commission, I'm afraid it will just add to the bureaucracy and patronage politics that are already a maddeing part of The City's political life.

Civil Grand Jury Report on San Francisco Entertainment Commission

A civil grand jury has been looking into the policies and effectiveness of San Francisco's Entertainment Commission, and judging from the title of their report, "The San Francisco Entertainment Commission: A Work in Progress," they've not been too impressed with their findings. I skimmed through the report on the SFGov site and it generally seems that no one (including the commissioners) is sure what the commission does, what authority it has over clubs, or what its relationship with the police department is supposed to be. Additionally, they haven't been filing their progress reports, so no one else in the city government knows what's going on, and they don't have performance reviews of the staff or the Executive Director, so there's no accountability either.

This a real shame, since the Entertainment Commission was formed to support clubs and nightlife in San Francisco by taking their permitting and regulation away from the police, who had a vested interest in shutting everything down. As it now stands the Entertainment Commission seems, at best, to have no sense itself of what it can and cannot do, and has not been at all effective in dealing with major issues like the Eastern Neighborhoods zoning proposals, Halloween in the Castro, dealing with issues surrounding street fairs, or even helping to manage situations like the Club Six and Hole in the Wall controversies I reported on some weeks ago. Let's hope this civil grand jury report will shake things up and get the commission to be an effective part of the San Francisco city government.

More on the Hall in the Wall Re-Location

Jeez, it just gets harder and harder to do anything in this city without someone getting pissed off about something to do with bars and clubs, whether it's noise, or, in this case, potential cigarette smoke and noise wafting up from a patio into a neighbor's window. The Bay Guardian has all the details about the current controversy surrounding the re-location of the Hole in the Wall to 10th Street, a controversy allegedly stirred up by Jim Meko, a member of the San Francisco Entertainment Commission and the Western SoMA Citizens Planning Task Force, and Damian Ochoa. As Jeremy Paul, a permit expediter (only in SF, my friends) hired by the owners of the Hole put it in a quote from the Guardian story, "'The Hole in the Wall relocation is a case study in how dysfunctional this system is,' . . Zoning in the area allows for a bar, he said, 'and if these people don't want to live in a bar district, they should check the zoning where they're buying a house or renting an apartment' before moving there." All in all it's a big fat mess.

And it just gets messier: A little more link tracking led to this fascinating exchange in the comments section of an article on this matter at sf.curbed.com. In fairness, here's Jim Meko's response.

What's going on? I dunno, but it's all messy, messy, messy, and a great example of how difficult it is to not only run bars and clubs in San Francisco, but to also just deal with a local political scene that thrives on divisiveness and ad hominem attacks (when not throwing beer on people).

More on Extended Closing Times

Last night's blogger meetup concluded with only the party boys left at the bar - myself and Ted Strawser of the sfpartyparty. We got into a discussion about extended closing times for bars that was proposed by Terrance Alan of the SF Entertainment Commission and how we would like to put some grassroots muscle behind getting the legislation through. That bars close at 2AM in San Francisco is not only silly in comparison with other major American cities (even in Atlanta they don't close until 4AM), but it creates a lot of problems as large numbers of drunk people spill out into the streets at the exact same time every Friday and Saturday night. Resource competition becomes fierce as everyone is trying to get a cab at the same time, more drunks are put on the roads as they look for another party locale, long lines stretch down the block as folks queue up to get into afterhours clubs, and, in general, a large number of drunken people hit the streets of San Francisco all at once.

I remembered that Britain recently decided to change pub and club closing hours so that bars can now stay open 24 hours a day, rather than having to close at 11PM (pubs) or 2AM (clubs). The press declared that this would result in crazy drunkeness and that alcohol industry profits would soar. Well, as it turns out, by letting bars set their own hours, resulting in a staggering of closing times (so to speak), alcohol-related violence and public disorderliness have substantially decreased throughout Britain, and the drinks industries have not seen any substantial change in their profit numbers. Here's an article in The Telegraph from last November that looks at statistics gathered a year after the change in licensing laws, and another from The Independent. So, based on the British experience, it would seem that many of the problems currently associated with bars and clubs in San Francisco, most of which stem from large crowds of people pouring into the streets at the same time, could be solved by changing bar closing times, or even giving bar and club owners the power to set closing times for themselves. We already have bars that open at 6AM (like Twin Peaks and The Mix in the Castro), so why not let the bars decide for themselves what time they want to close based on what is economically viable for them?

Ted and I were finishing up our drinks around 9PM last night, and as we talked about this, we realized that if we were in New York we'd probably be making plans to get some dinner, then maybe finish off at a club (if it wasn't a school night for both of us). Instead, by the time 11PM rolls around, most people are ready to settle in because there's not that much time left in the evening. The whole cultural complexion of this city could be altered by making this one change, and I for one would love to see what happens.

New Call to Extend Closing Times to 4AM

According to this article in the Examiner Terrance Alan, in his role as a member of the Entertainment Commission, is once again trying to get the state legislature to change last call from 2AM to 4AM, a measure that was last considered in 2004. I think Terrance is completely right on this one when he says that the mass exodus of people from bars and clubs at 2Am is behind most of the noise and other complaints lodged against bars and clubs. Anybody who has rolled out of Drunk and Horny at 1.45 on a Saturday night knows about all the jacked-up people looking for something to do who then congregate on the sidewalk while they try to find out where the afterparty is. If bars closed at 4AM you'd have much more of a steady trickle between 1AM and 4AM, as Terrance points out, in addition to the fact that people tend to binge drink and emerge a lot more fucked up than if they were taking it in throughout the night (this was also confirmed by the British when they looked into extending closing times for pubs). Closing at 4AM would also alleviate the problems of cab hell that emerge when everybody is looking for a way home at the same time.

Also in the article, The Zebra Club in North Beach gets its license suspended after a deputy sheriff gets punched in the face, and the owner of Club 6 in SoMa (on 6th Street, one of the worst streets in SF), is issued a citation for noise.

Death of the Hole in the Wall?

Well, looks like the NIMBYs, specifically a guy named Jim Meko, are at it again in SoMa. The situation is this: The Hole in the Wall, which used to be one of my fave little punk rock gay dive bars, is trying to get out of their current building into another two blocks away. This move is being blocked by Meko, who is also a member of the Entertainment Commission. Details are in this blog entry on sf.curbed.com and the San Francisco Bay Times website. If you're local and you want to suppor the owners of the Hole, read these articles, then send a letter of support to:

President Dwight Alexander
San Francisco Planning Department
1600 Mission St. Fifth Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103