New Rules for Promenade Permits

Folk artists, protesters, ventriloquists and other entertainers and organizers who draw crowds of 75 people or more to the Third Street Promenade will now work directly with the city—not the downtown business district—when applying for event permits.

Under new rules adopted by the City Council this week, city staffers will handle processing for such events. They said Downtown Santa Monica Inc., a public-private management company that oversees downtown, has issued permits for some events that might not be up to code and retained the permit fees as revenues to the corporation.

As an example, city staffers pointed to a promotional event that involved a corporation installing two floored and wired tents on the Promenade for several weeks to advertise a new 3-D computer game that passers-by could test.

"Questions arose as to whether this type of event conforms to city guidelines for events occupying space on public streets and to legal requirements prohibiting the privatization of public property," staffers wrote in a memo.

Fees for such events range between $1,500 and $3,800 daily. 

In 2003, Santa Monica was sued by Food Not Bombs and other groups that challenged an ordinance that makes the permits a requirement, alleging permit  and the rules violated their freedom to assemble. Though they won on nearly all counts, city officials said they don't want to take risks allowing another organization to vet permit appliactions for it.

Citywide, the threshold for organized events has been 150. Recently, Downtown Santa Monica Inc. started issuing the permits for events for fewer than that number. The new threshold of 75 is also needed for safety reasons, the City Council said. The promenade is jammed with tourists in peak tourist times, but there are few paths for emergency crews.

"Some of those events, though smaller, fell within the definition of 'community events'; others were primarily promotional; and many of those would have been classified as vending, under the applicable code provisions," city staffers wrote in a memo.

The events of fewer than 75 people composed the majority of the applications last year, said Downtown Santa Monica Inc. Vice President Debbie Lee.

They generated between $150,000 and $250,000 for the district, she said.

"The event requests have grown over the years with the growth of the popularity of this area; we get a lot of requests from companies that want to showcase their products," Lee said.

The City Council adopted the fee structure in 2005. Although the city code mentions that the downtown district, then called the Bayside District Corp., should be involved in coordinating events, it did not authorize it to collect or impose the fees.