Events task force delivers recommendations for managing major gatherings

The city will likely begin collecting and publishing comprehensive information on major events and music festivals in the coming years as part of a widespread revision to the special events ordinance that regulates large gatherings impacting communities and city services.

City Council is expected today to approve the long-awaited recommendations of the Special Events Task Force, which was formed in 2018 to evaluate how the city can better manage major events such as South by Southwest and the Austin City Limits Music Festival, as well as smaller gatherings such as neighborhood festivals that had routinely been hampered by the approvals and permits needed from various city departments.

The recommendations include some updates to a handful of actions already approved by Council because they were found to be timely enough to warrant immediate consideration. The remaining new items are split into four core areas: reporting, notifications, amplified sound and administration of the Austin Center for Events, the primary city entity handling regulations and permitting for gatherings.

The recommendation under the reporting category tasks ACE with collecting data on large events, defined as being more than four days long, with a crowd bigger than 2,500, or requiring more than $100,000 in city services such as public safety and resource management. ACE would need to begin collecting and publishing the data by 2026, with 16 criteria including event history, names of event producers/entities, daily attendance, summaries of complaints to 311, and assessment of the likelihood of future approvals.

The administrative recommendations include a rubric for prioritizing approvals for major events with overlapping days, lowering the approval threshold for events that have gone five or more years with no violations or substantial logistical changes, and providing more transparency to ACE’s evaluation and approval process.

The amplified sound recommendations address a minor noise curfew issue with Independence Day celebrations on non-weekend days, and clarifies the limits on ACE-approved amplified sound equipment use within a 30-day period.

The notifications section’s only recommendation covers how much advance notice is needed for impacted neighbors, with long-standing events with no violations or significant logistical changes receiving more notification leeway.

Of the five recommendations previously submitted to Council, the resolution up for a vote today withholds the proposed funding increase to ACE, and directs the city manager to review the office’s current staffing levels to determine if the demand for special event permits is at a level to justify a budget increase.

The task force was originally charged with producing its findings and recommendations by late March 2020, so it could evaluate the demands put upon city departments during the spring festival season that’s largely composed of SXSW and its many offshoot events. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic erased that deadline, causing City Council to give the group an extension until this fall to complete its work.

​​The report includes a final section with no recommendation regarding the growth of high-capacity venues such as the Moody Center and Q2 Stadium, which are making a sizable impact on the city’s infrastructure.

It reads, in part: “These new staffing obligations, vacancies within ACE public safety partner departments, and the annual busy seasons of fall ACL and F1 weekends and spring festival season raise concerns about the city’s ability to provide adequate on-site public safety for events in upcoming years. Under current City Code, these venues are not required to submit special event applications as their activities are in alignment with the designated occupancy/use type for the properties: ‘assembly’. The venues have an informal agreement with ACE to submit one application per year, per event type (i.e. concert or game) and then notify the city of upcoming events so city staffing needs can be scheduled.”

Suggested steps to address those concerns include putting a moratorium on special events for dates with insufficient city staffing, denying road closures to venues that don’t adequately notify the city of upcoming events, and having the city suggest security options outside of Austin Police Department, while providing support for enabling those third-party staffing solutions.

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

The Austin Monitor’s work is made possible by donations from the community. Though our reporting covers donors from time to time, we are careful to keep business and editorial efforts separate while maintaining transparency. A complete list of donors is available here, and our code of ethics is explained here.