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Adam Meister
Baltimore Politics Examiner
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Showing entries for Category: Federal-Hill
Report From The Live Entertainment Ordinance Hearing
2 comments
"An interesting mix of club owners, musicians and community association leaders showed up for the presentation. I would say probably 50 to 60 in total.
The left-field concern for me was the creative community’s fear over the specter of City Hall enabling the community to effectively wield a weapon of censorship by requiring a license for live entertainment. Of course most entrepreneurs in the so-called “hospitality business” don’t pretend to be critics – all they care about is giving the audience what it wants and making as much money as they can doing just that. While the phrase “local community standards” is liberally used in most federal rules with respect to defining “decency” or “indecency as far as content is concerned, my sense is that residents really don’t have a dog in this particular hunt.
The Council President mentioned this “Blue-Ribbon Task Force” that worked with the Responsible Hospitality Institute to come up with this proposal to create a brand new City Bureaucracy at a time when all businesses were struggling. It still is not clear who the members of the Task Force were, but not a single person at the meeting last night stood up to admit they participated.
No wonder! The clubs that are already zoned for live entertainment (like the 8 by 10 in Federal Hill) realize that Madame President is about create literally thousands of new competitors with the stroke of a pen. 8 by 10 is forced to pay an 11% Entertainment Tax to the State so selling $1.00 long-necks is virtually impossible. Moreover, 8 by 10’s owner is wondering how the City and State propose to fund regulation all of these new entertainment venues for regulatory and tax collection purposes? Madame President says it will only require a paid staff of 3 (the Director of Hospitality and 2 support staff people).
The consensus seemed to be that the system involving zoning and the Board of Liquor Commissioners while not perfect could be improved with increased enforcement of existing law. This would obviously be a whole lot more cost effective than creating a new City Bureaucracy that is likely to serve no purpose other than to increase operating costs for hospitality business owners City-wide.
Local politicians should find the fund-raising opportunity interesting. Although, the 7 co-sponsors of this Bill might just find themselves pulling in fewer dollars than the few that did not follow the President’s lead."
Topics: Federal Hill , Stephanie Rawlings-Blake , Live Entertainment
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