Council approves ordinance change making music venues easier to open

Music venues and some other creative spaces will have an easier time opening in all parts of the city as a result of City Council approving an update to the building code that lowers planning and zoning restrictions on those businesses.

The code amendment passed on consent, ending a nearly decadelong push by live music proponents to make it easier for small music venues to open outside of downtown where that use is allowed by right.

Until the change on Thursday, live music venues had to operate under the bars and nightclubs regulations in the building code because the city lacked an explicit definition for hospitality businesses where live music performance serves as a main attraction for customers. The bar/nightclub classification made it costly and prohibitive to try to open a live music venue outside of downtown because of the harsher regulations to gain approval to open closer to residential neighborhoods.

City Council directed staff to initiate the ordinance change last summer to create an easier path for music venues and other arts/cultural uses that weren’t spelled out in the building code.

“What it says is that we recognize that these types of businesses are culturally and economically valuable and that we can no longer take for granted that they’re going to be here in this new economy going forward without some attention,” said Rebecca Reynolds, president and founder of the Austin chapter of the Music Venue Alliance.

Reynolds and her colleagues have spent years working to fine-tune the requirements for a business to qualify as a music venue, which could eventually be eligible for economic incentives or included as a community benefit developers can use to increase the density on their building projects.

Staff analysis of the change showed that allowing music venues with a conditional use permit would make nearly 13,000 parcels across the city newly eligible as a site for a music venue. That would represent a nearly 700 percent increase from what has been allowed previously, with downtown serving as the major location for live music.

“We want to see genre-specific, neighborhood-specific opportunities for people to really build out their culture and their neighborhoods without having to travel downtown or drive far distances,” Reynolds said. “If you’re in District 8, there’s zero (venues), really. So there’s definitely some dead zones around town where I know people are craving close-to-home walkable, hyperlocal opportunities for music in their communities.”

With the ordinance amendment approved, more of Reynolds’ time and energy is being directed at helping her group’s member clubs prepare their paperwork and applications for the new Texas Music Incubator Rebate Program. Launched on Sept. 1, the incubator is available for music venues that have been open for at least two years, with a rebate of up to $100,000 in liquor tax payments available to applicants.

Reynolds said she’s already assisted more than a dozen Austin clubs prepare to submit their documents to the program’s online portal.

“This program is far more navigable than many of the city programs have been. I was able to send out a preliminary checklist to venues that I have on my email list to help them get prepared on the documents that they were going to need to have ready,” she said. “Across the board I’m hearing people say, ‘I can have more shows, I can pay more musicians, we can do more things.’ … They really are leaving it up to the business owners to use the money in good faith to continue doing what they’ve been doing.”

Photo by Paul Hudson from United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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