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Entertainment venues, including coffeehouses in the City of San Diego will soon face stiff increases in the yearly fees imposed on them by the San Diego Police Department for entertainment and other licensing permits when a new law goes into effect. Municipal Code Section 33.0307 raises permit fees for many "police regulated" businesses. The stated reason for the fee increase is that the SDPD Vice Squad needs to recoup all its operating costs related to these regulated businesses. That means that every dollar expended on to run background checks on applicants and send officers whenever the cops are called will come from the regulated businesses themselves. The changes in permit fees may significantly affect the coffeehouses now offering entertainment-and the entertainers who perform in them-and drive some venues out of the entertainment business, inflicting collateral damage on scores of entertainers that need cafe‚ venues to meet their public. What appears at first glance to be just another "readjustment" of city spending during tough economic times is actually another attempt to effect a sea change in how-or if-culture happens in San Diego. Many kinds of businesses are affected by increases in fee costs, too..

COPS: ENTERTAINMENT EQUALS CRIME

"Police Regulated Businesses" are those presumed to attract crime, thus requiring significant, continuous oversight from law enforcement and the Vice Squad in particular. The City Attorney and police define which types businesses are to be Vice regulated and that includes most places where "entertainment" of any sort is provided. Police generally consider all entertainment venues as magnets for drugs and gang crime and have shown little ability or desire to distinguish rock concerts or jazz clubs from book signings or one-act plays in intimate theatres. Vice requires operators and employees in businesses as diverse as money exchangers and holistic health practitioners and firearms dealers-as well as coffeehouse owners who offer entertainment-to have their mug shot taken, finger prints filed and background checks made as a prerequisite for doing business. Along with pawn brokers, nude dancers, card room operators and outcall masseuses, the providers of entertainment are seen as enablers of problems needing to be solved by police and City government. The permit process is a mechanism that gives government a firmer control over business by allowing Vice to impose restrictions and conditions on regulated businesses through terms attached to the permits they issue. Troublesome businesses can be made to disappear quickly since Vice can always refuse to renew an expired permit or place virtually impossible operating conditions on a permit. While the PD's "entertainment equals crime" view is admirably egalitarian and inclusive, and seems only to ignore entertainment funded through endowments, it leaves many people fuming at the thought of being tied to criminal activity merely for attending a show, or providing a venue for one. "It pisses me off if there is this assumption sometimes that music equals trouble," said Happy Ron, a local singer-songwriter who began his rise in area coffeehouses. "You might as well just ban 'public get-togethers'. Music at coffee shops is about the most 'peaceful' way of people getting together imaginable, and the music tends to be on the peaceful side," he said. Some coffeehouse owners have told ESPRESSO that entertainment is their key to remaining alive in tough economic times and that anything that crimps performance schedules is a direct threat to their existence. "If entertainment becomes unaffordable, I'll have to close; no question. It's that important," said one Hillcrest cafe‚ owner, requesting anonymity because his house's beer and wine license is still under consideration by Vice. John Husler of Lestat's depends on entertainment for his profits; Lestat's West, next door to the coffeehouse has been a non-stop venue for many new performers who have gone on to bigger places for over a decade. The theatre has allowed Husler to take over the corner on the other side of the coffeehouse and add an additional 1600 square feet of caf‚ space. At first glance, the cost increases do not appear to be large. An Entertainment Permit for a business that does not sell alcohol and seats fifty or fewer people pays $920 per year now, and the cost increase will raise the cost to $978 per year in the future. But if a cafe that sells beer and wine wants an Entertainment Permit for a location that seats 50 or more, the cost jumps from a current $1840 to $3253 per year. Some observers note that the increase follows a growth in the number of businesses that sell beer and wine and seat fifty or more. Last year, the SDPD changed its rules concerning entertainment permits and beer and wine licenses. Previously, each permit had been a time-consuming process involving detailed background checks and neighborhood factors to determine if a petioning business could offer alcohol or events. Due to a need to streamline costs and save PD man hours, the permits process became linked so that if a business successfully applied for either a beer and wine or entertainment permit and had no police calls in their first year of operation, an application for the other permit could be granted with less intense PD scrutiny. The rise of the city's wine bars evidence the easier permit process; so do the number of coffeehouses offering music nightly. The PD may claim a windfall of regulated businesses' permit fees that can help keep them functioning as the city contends with its crippling debt.

SHAPING CULTURE VIA BUREAUCRACY

The Vice cops' costs for last year amounted to $1,096,583 and next year they claim their costs will require $2,387,630. Vice argues that their man hours of work costs the city a great deal of money that it doesn't have and that this should be paid out of the businesses that require the most effort from them. In addition to caf‚s, bars and restaurants, San Diego's Vice Squad oversees holisitic health practitioners, massage therapists, resale vendors, adult entertainment businesses, firearms dealers among others. Some of these businesses will see their permit fees jump well over 100 percent; massage therapists will pay $237 for licenses; up from $84, while massage trainees will pay $573 per year. They pay $124 yearly now. Gun dealers in the city will be hardest hit: Their yearly permit rates are $660 and this will incrase to $4671 per year. The smallest cafes or other venues trying to work up from humble quarters to bigger and more profitable operations will likely face greater challenges. For a small caf‚ with less than fifty seats, increasing legal seating means significant expense, and a beer and wine permit will raise those figures still higher. A jump in Entertainment Permits from $978 per year for a fifty seat house without alcohol to $3253 per year for fifty seats plus with alcohol may mean the difference between trying to grow or remaining small for some business owners. Others won't have that choice in this depressed economy-if growth becomes unaffordable, their options cease. Fewer venues means greater struggle for entertainers of all kinds, especially newcomers and those seeking places to offer experimental work. As Happy Ron puts it, "I've played in coffeehouses around five hundred times; it's a community thing-a way of peacefully having a good time. Most people who play in coffeehouses are effectively losing money; they're not getting paid or getting paid so little they can't make a living. (But) they work on things there. My second album has songs that I've tried out audiences in some coffeehouses and I won't record them until I have about thirteen or fourteen that they love," he said. Those "peaceful" cafes offer wide awake audiences that react more coherently to an artist's talents than bar crowds do, say some entertainers-and a sharper audience helps make a better performance, even at a grass roots level. Claire De Lune's middle east revue of bellydancers, the spoken word artists at Rebecca's, the quartet from the symphony that regularly drop into Bassam's and the solo violin concerts occasionally offered by an 8-year old Tierrasanta girl wouldn't be found in bars. Their loss to the growth of culture here would be the Vice cops' gain. In San Diego, the balance between the needs of law enforcement and entertainment venues resembles a zero sum game; one that SDPD does not intend to lose. The cops believe they are spread dangerously thin already at 1.6 officers per thousand San Diegans which ratio is far less than other US cities. For them, limits on entertainment are a simple way to ease their burden. Culture, especially in something as small as an indie coffeehouse, isn't on their radar. The unaudited-and thus far unchallenged-numbers that describe the Vice Squad's costs will doubtless shape the kinds of businesses that remain in San Diego; those that can't or won't pay the costs will move to outlying suburbs and enrich the cafes in areas willing to receive them. The increase in permit fees becomes a subtle, yet enormously powerful tool to shape the kinds of business and entertainment cultures that can grow here. So far, that tool remains unchallenged and rarely noticed. But business groups may have something to say about the increases. One of those is the Food and Beverage Association of San Diego, headed by Stephen Zolezzi, which is currently working quietly with the City, the mayor's office and PD to influence how the cops' costs will affect business. One plan that was recently floated is to create a separate category of regulated business specifically tailored to caf‚s and other "small venues" that may be exempted from the permit increases. Though nothing is firm yet, Zolezzi thinks that creating a separate category of entertainment venue, limiting numbers of musicians on stage and possibly prohibiting amplified music may carve out some breathing room for small businesses. This would be coupled with a level of transparency that oversees Vice budget needs. The Food and Beverage Association has long been a watchdog for the hospitality industry here and one of Zolezzi's many functions is to work with all levels of government to keep friction to a minimum. Zolezzi's organization inspired the charge in 2000 against a proposed City ordinance that would have treated coffeehouses that offered entertainment the same as bars-meaning that they would have been 21 and up only if entertainment of any sort was offered and they would have been required to meet the same criteria as bars, taverns and restaurants with bouncers at the door checking ID. The proposed ordinance was quickly shot down after word got around the performers, artists and creative community that depends on coffeehouses and hundreds of concerned cafe‚ patrons flooded police public hearings and City Council meetings until the law was amended. Subsequent permit ordinances were more nuanced in their approach to the city's cafe scene. Since 2000, entertainment in coffeehouses has blossomed to the point where some of them consider hosting performance as necessary to the bottom line as selling their signature coffee and keeping the doors open. In a depressed economy, the coffeehouse art scenes are a bigger draw for a public that has tightened its belts and at present it is one of the few hospitality business models that has maintained or slightly increased overall market share. Compared to many restaurants and bars that report a sixty percent downturn in business in the last year, the coffeehouses are now considered to be golden geese. Hopefully, they will be worth saving, too.