For months, the Asheville Busker’s Collective has tried to deal with city staff in good faith to find common ground. But the latest busking proposal is more restrictive than ever, and will hurt our local culture and livelihoods
Above: The Stillwater Hobos performing in a still from Erin Derham’s movie Buskin Blues, about Asheville’s busker culture.
This is an opinion piece from the Asheville Buskers’ Collective about their experience dealing with city staff. A plan for busking restrictions and other rules will be considered by Asheville City Council’s Public Safety Commission today at 3 p.m.
Before discussing the specifics of Asheville City Staff’s proposed Pilot Program and ordinance revisions, to which the Asheville Buskers Collective (ABC) is adamantly opposed, we must note that despite what we believed to be an open and transparent series of stakeholder meetings, the city staff have proposed new regulations so detrimental to buskers that they would effectively put many buskers out of business or force them to leave Asheville. Some of these new regulations:
• Were either not previously discussed in any open forum with buskers or other stakeholders, or were met with wide opposition.
• Are apparently earmarked for implementation with less than a weeks notice.
• With minimal stakeholder discussion and little to no follow-up between meetings.
• Will be followed immediately by a decisive meeting of the Public Safety Committee (PSC) that will include a public comment period, but not open discussion, with no time for reflection or rebuttal of ideas.
The ABC wants to work with city staff, not against it. But regulatory implementation in this manner is adversarial rather than cooperative, and is a return to the rightly criticized exclusion and short decision time frames practiced by city staff last year, before commitments were made to a more open and inclusive process. City Council election results in November clearly favored candidates who did not advocate the staff proposals on busking of late 2015, and yet we see that the some of the staff proposals of mid 2016 are remarkably similar, though they are no longer couched in the same language. Boxes are out, artistic symbols denoting performance spaces are in, yet enforcement of the same idea is intact. Furthermore, we find that the new city staff proposals regarding the high impact areas do not address the actual public safety problems that are widely agreed upon. Rather, they arbitrarily regulate free speech and public art under the guise of being the only way to increase public safety in these locations.
Over the past two years, the Asheville Buskers Collective has attempted to work with city staff to address the public safety issues associated with busking. It is important to note that this is however, a tourist problem – not a busking problem. We hold that restricting busking to solve a tourist problem will not be effective, and will needlessly cripple our city’s flourishing public performances without solving the public space management issues.
The proposed ordinance pays lip service to the benefits of artistic performances on city sidewalks, and then proceeds to micromanage performances rather than implementing the common-sense, simple, cost effective solution of sidewalk expansion and asset rearrangement in the high impact areas that would more effectively use our finite public spaces. The proposed ordinance praises buskers for the cultural enrichment they provide – and then contains punishing regulation that would change busking as we know it by putting many buskers out of business. Repeatedly, we have heard that there is no money in the budget for public infrastructure changes that would address the tourist crowds. This is difficult to accept in light of the recently passed city budget which has earmarked tens of thousands of dollars to a new “Crime Analyst” position in the Asheville Police Department. Without weighing in on the merits of a crime analyst to our City, we find it contradictory that the City has money to spend analyzing data for unknown problems and solutions to public safety issues, while claiming that they do not have money to spend implementing on the known problems and solutions as advocated by the Collective and other stakeholders. Perhaps this is due to Council funding priorities, and we appeal to Council Members to examine the merits of some public spending to help solve the over crowding problem. We suggest that some funding to fix known congestion problems would neither compromise the upcoming Downtown Master Plan revisions nor break the bank.
Crowds spilling onto the roads from the sidewalks has been the prime reason cited for needing regulations. We agree that this is a cause for concern and merits a solution. But the high impact areas of busking are hardly the only places where this problem exists, and the city has not addressed these other areas. For example, the city routinely ignores the crowds that spill onto and block the sidewalks on Biltmore Ave. adjacent to the Orange Peel and Wicked Weed when patrons line up for sold out shows, sometimes for hours, before the doors open. Just last month, the sidewalk was expanded on Walnut Street next to Sovereign Remedies to create more space for al fresco dining. If the city staff finds public resources like parking, sidewalks and other fixtures like light poles and signage to be flexible assets to be allocated according to the needs of these interests, we ask that they use that same type of thinking to address the public safety issues associated with tourist crowds at the high impact areas. The city’s proposals at Pack Square reflect this approach; in other areas, it does not.
While our interest is in maintaining public space for performance, we understand that buskers are only successful in locations where a wide group of other uses are successful too: tourists, pedestrians, retailers, restauranteurs and hoteliers to name a few. Buskers are one of the indicators of a flourishing urban landscape – we flourish when and where everyone else does.
We also seek to prevent the City from implementing changes that will lead to unintended negative consequences. In light of this, it is important to note that busking will not go away. For every professional busker that is deterred from performing due to regulations, an amateur busker will take their place as long as foot traffic exists. While the nature of busking is that it is open to all, and we all started out as amateur buskers, the less experienced performers often do not know the rules and regulations, are less likely to be providing the performance quality that Asheville is used to experiencing on the street and are more likely to interact with police. We have said many times and continue to assert that regulations first push out the professional busker. Fostering a professional class of buskers that establishes a culture that shows by example how to be a good busker, and it is the least intrusive regulations that allow for a professional busker class to develop. It is certainly a delicate balance, and one that we doubt is well covered in the urban design and public space management literature that staff have access to. We can help fill that knowledge gap.
While we agree with city staff on the public safety problem related to large crowds of tourists, we disagree on many of the solutions, and find that city staff has created a false process to bring us on board with their agenda of creating limited performance spaces, which remains substantially unchanged from where it stood prior to the stakeholder meetings. “No” is not the only word we know. It is not that we are closed to compromise, but there are many compromises possible all of widely varying impacts on all the stakeholders. We find that the set of proposals presented by the city do not represent the compromise that best represents the combined needs of our uses of public spaces. Ideas like removing legacy infrastructure and plantings around trees were removed from the discussion with no explanation. No one jumped to the defense of the light pole in front of Woolworth’s, with its peeling green paint protruding directly in the path of pedestrians whether buskers were present or not. Moving the Flat Iron a few feet backwards seems worth exploring, or utilizing the bare asphalt not marked as a parking spot in that location. Is it that these were too expensive or protected by some other community interest? We simply do not know, and that is where we find the process lacking.
Compromise is a laudable goal — but choosing a compromise that leads to negative unintended results indicates that placating citizens eclipses the goal of creating a workable solution. The real solution to these issues is indeed public space management. Many of our suggestions on how to deal with our limited sidewalks have not been explored. Yet we’ve seen U-Haul car sharing, special police-only parking zones and outdoor dining spaces all considered and implemented in the name of public interest and sometimes for the benefit of private businesses without years of study or large expense. The same approach — using our finite public space to effectively accommodate for the actual uses of the public — can be used in the areas affected by tourist crowds.
The pilot plan does not contain the totality of the community’s expertise and input that we thought was being solicited at stakeholder meetings. Over a series of meetings in 2015 and 2016, we were pleased to have elevated the conversation from the press to the inside of City Hall, and felt that real progress was in the making. We made it clear that we were not just a bunch of people saying “no,” and that like many other special-interest groups that cooperate with the City, we held a unique expertise in a subject. Seeing this proposal now, it is clear that the stated intentions of city staff and the stakeholder meeting process that we have been a part are not to be found in the compromise, and what is to be found is the same thing that we rejected as not only detrimental to busking but ineffective at addressing the public safety concerns: “boxes” limiting performers to certain marked areas and tasking police to enforce these rules.
Scheduling performances and registering buskers does not alleviate tourist crowds or contribute to public safety, and will likely create conflicts between performers. Prohibiting any performances within 100 feet of musical acts puts living statues and other similar small-footprint buskers out of work without a clear public benefit. Seeing these kinds of proposals indicates that we have been engaged in a false process of community input, where we are invited to the table and are “heard” in some matters but not listened to in others.
Point by Point Examination of Staff Proposal
In the new proposal, the city staff has restated ideas from last September to which the ABC objected at that time, and which we thought had been rejected. Some, like allowing CD sales in the incentivized areas, are welcome but will have limited benefit because the incentivized areas don’t currently have the foot traffic that buskers look for when selecting a location. In some of the High Impact Areas, staff has discarded without explanation many of the suggestions made by the ABC at that time, and has introduced some new ideas which we find unreasonable and objectionable.
• Over the almost universal objections of practically everyone concerned last September, the boxes are back. (Without actually using the word “boxes”.) Instead of trying to reorient crowds to safer areas on the sidewalk within the high impact areas, a concept that the ABC agrees would be beneficial; the new proposal includes definitive (but unspecified) boundaries beyond which not so much as a performer’s little toe may cross. We predict constant ongoing police enforcement of this regulation, and the likelihood of inconsistent application of an overly specific law that will confuse those who seek to comply.
• There is no allowance for multiple performance types to co-exist in the absence of crowds causing public safety problems by spilling into the street which will prevent mimes, card readers, poetry writers, magicians, or jugglers from performing near a musical performance.
• The city staff proposes to register buskers, using an as yet undefined registration process that under the best of circumstances will prevent many buskers from performing in the high impact areas (which are the best busking areas in town) upon their arrival in Asheville, and under the worst of circumstances will prevent many buskers from performing in the high impact areas at all.
• Even worse, the city staff has apparently decided to enter the talent booking business by requiring performances to be scheduled in advance and restricted in length by some as yet undefined method. Realistically, the high impact areas are best suited to the most popular larger bands, and if these spots are continually scheduled by other performers, the most popular performers will be forced to either leave town, or set up to play in other areas less suitable to those types of performances. If the high impact areas are scheduled mainly for musical performances, what will become of those who perform as living statues? Our concerns are that any such system could be exploited by one or more performers to the detriment of the over all busking culture in Asheville.
• Allowing CD sales in the Incentivized Areas is welcome, and does reflect our input and the huge demand that the public has to support buskers with a purchase of a CD of their favorite performers to take back home. Although the ABC has no objection to the suggested Incentivized Areas, we have tried to communicate to staff that buskers go to perform where people are, not where some city staffers would wish them to be. While we have agreed with city staff that allowing CD and limited merchandise sales in the Incentivized Areas may necessitate an amount of permitting and/or registration, city staff has expanded that to include registration of performance in the High Impact areas where merchandise sales are not proposed.
• The proposed scheduling of performances in the High Impact areas is an unwarranted government intrusion into the buskers’ practices that goes well beyond any public safety concerns. Think of it this way: it is reasonable for government to regulate food handling and food safety practices, but it is not reasonable that government responded to long lines outside of a successful restaurant by setting up a city-managed reservation system and forced compliance on restauranteurs. Buskers should not have to be part of such a difficult to maintain bureaucracy that does not provide a public benefit.
• The Pilot Program is a pilot program in name only. If ordinance changes are required to be made in order to move forward with the Pilot Program, they do not expire at the end of the program, thus making the changes permanent until revisited by council, just as permanent as any other ordinances on the books. No further action or study would be required. We’d rather try and get this right the first time, even if that means more meetings.
• Pack Square: The proposals from the city here are positive and indicate that we’ve been heard in some matters: by rearranging the benches, the information kiosk, and the vending cart location there will be more sidewalk space for most performances as well as tourists. The Asheville Buskers Collective had a part in crafting that solution. We think that most of the positive intended results will come from rearranging the assets, not from limiting performance space.
• At the other High Impact locations, the Flat Iron sculpture and in front of Woolworth’s we would like to see similar solutions. Most of our suggestions in these locations have been discarded without explanation and replaced with the original staff proposal of boxed performing spaces.
Conclusion
In most aspects, city staff has chosen the most intrusive, rather than the least intrusive methods of achieving the intended result, and the Collective believes that the limited “performance spaces” in the high impact areas proposed will be ineffective in addressing public safety issues associated with tourist crowding. Public space management is a problem best solved by design, not with byzantine rules on performance areas that will lead to increased interactions between buskers and the police officers who will have to enforce these boxes, scheduling, and time limits. These solutions are a poor example of Public Space Management and in our view, stem from a false process of community stakeholder input, and treats city staff proposals from last year as a foregone conclusion. It seems as though limiting busking is the agenda, and public safety questions have been raised as a route to enact that. We believe that because reasonable alternatives to answering the public safety issues have been discarded, and we’ve returned to limiting busking as the sole answer to keeping our crowds safe.
While there might not be a consensus position that was developed in the stakeholder input process, that is not a reason to revert to the idea of boxes/performance spaces that existed before the stakeholder process began. The sense of compromise that we get from staff is that compromise means placating citizens with an input process fraught with selective hearing, and laced with unexplained rejections of our suggestions that could develop compromises that answer public safety issues without restricting buskers.
The Asheville Buskers Collective and the busking community with whom we have spoken are adamantly opposed to these new heavy-handed, unreasonable, and ineffective proposed regulations on high impact areas. At the very least, we urge the Public Safety Committee to table the proposals for further consideration. We ask the PSC to direct the City Manager to task staff with implementing public space management measures that address public safety issues without restricting busking by expanding sidewalks and rearranging public assets in the high impact areas to create more space at the earliest opportunity.
—
The Asheville Buskers Collective is a local group that advocates for buskers and their interests in Asheville.
The Asheville Blade is entirely funded by its readers. If you like what we do, donate directly to us on Patreon or make a one-time gift to support our work. Questions? Comments? Email us.