Tonight’s meeting of the Fullerton City Council includes an item seeking direction from the Council about whether or not outdoor amplified music should be allowed as a part of uniform standards guiding the awarding of Conditional Use Permits to restaurants and bars downtown. Currently, only one such business is allowed to operate under these conditions. The Slidebar was quietly drawn into the Fullerton Transportation Center Specific Plan, adopted several years ago, where such conditions are considered acceptable. Other bars and restaurants have begun to request similar rights, with some fine distinctions between them, but the Planning Commission has decided that there is a “lack of applicable criteria by which to evaluate the requests” in the Fullerton Municipal Code.
Rather than spend the $ 10,500 for new sound study, recommended by the Planning Staff, the City Council could simply defer to one already conducted six years ago, and make the responsible decision that no outdoor live amplified music ought to be allowed downtown or anywhere else in Fullerton unless we want to be known officially as Party Town USA. This latter suggestion is always an option. We can judge easily what it would look like downtown if more venues allowed live bands to play electrically amplified music by simply looking at the Slidebar on any given night.
The Fullerton City Council can choose to make Downtown Fullerton a permanent Austin style South by Southwest Festival, or a year-round New Orleans style Mardi Gras if it decides that that is how our local economy should work. If they think they have a better idea, then they should make it simple and forbid live outdoor music downtown.
fullertonrag.com 
Understand why bars and restaurants often have ridiculously loud music. It’s the same reason that fast food places often have not-too-comfortable seating and eye-straining colors: to keep the crowd turning over. Only friends of the band are there for the music, and they usually don’t buy much. Others will have their drink or two and then move on to some environment a little less stressful, vacating a seat for the next sucker.
To engage in such obnoxious marketing practices indoors, on people who have chosen to enter your establishment, is one thing. To impose it on the outdoors, on people who might be blocks away, is quite another.
LikeLike
The ordinance on the books accounts only for decibel measurements from a residential with complaints being measured by decibels from the spot you are complaining from.The town is too small to do expensive sound study’s when its just one or two bars usising very loud outdoor music.The managers responsible for loud music, and would probably be willing to regulate themselves if they had a standard to go by. A selected law enforcement officer could easily respond to a complaint use of a modern decibel meter which is fairly inexpensive and highly accurate.They could issue a warning that the music was over the limit. The whole idea behind an extensive sound test is so that a lawsuit would stand up to scrutiny of a court action.It was suggested by a city council member that all establishiments using outdoor music without a licence have their excersize to do so teminated. It seem that taking these measures would be making a mountain out of a molehill.
Its an easy fix to update the ordinance to include commercial areas.This ordinance was written poorly .75 decibles would be a good level measument from the sidewalk in front of the establishment or 60 measured from public seating withing the transportation seating areas at the bus terminal or train station.(This conclusion based on joint observation with a accurate decibel meter earlier this month.)
LikeLike
I’m not so sure the bars could be counted on to be self-regulating. Many routinely keep their doors open at night past 10:00 p.m. when they are supposed to be closed to keep the noise within from bleeding out into the streets.
I do agree with you that a sound study is too expensive. Why should the taxpayers spend over $ 10,000 to find out how loud a bar’s music is when the very idea of live amplified bands outside is idiotic.
LikeLike
Sounds like the rest of the bars are saying,why does the Slide bar get to have music outside and we don’t? Just a thought, maybe it would behoove us all to pay the owners to enclose the Slide bar?
That way a code enforcement officer could routinely audit these bars to insure compliance and issue warnings/citations/ and even suspend and/or pull the bar’s CUP to ensure that their doors are not open and that they are bothering as few neighbors as possible.
LikeLike