City, event planners talk planning and street closures during SXSW festival season

The city has started evaluating event permits and scheduling street closures taking place during next month’s South by Southwest festival, the 10-day period referred to in city planning circles as spring festival season.

One of those planned closures announced during a stakeholder meeting held last month by Austin Center for Events is a partial shutdown of Rainey Street from Davis Street to River Street beginning March 8 and running through March 16. Annette Martinez, division manager with the Transportation and Public Works Department, said the street will be closed to accommodate the heavy pedestrian presence from attendees of parties and concerts throughout the district, though the Austin Police Department is still working to determine what times each day when the street will open and close.

Also in that district, Martinez said the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, which is currently under construction, will be almost entirely closed to traffic throughout the festival except for a handful of nearby parking spaces that will be available for rideshare services.

Bill Manno, director of the Austin Center for Events, reminded those in attendance that the city has declared an indefinite moratorium on new on-street events in the Downtown Austin Project Coordination Zone, in large part because of the many construction projects ongoing throughout the area that would create public safety issues for any new street events. The city announced the extension of the closure, which was first instituted in 2014 on an annual basis, late last year.

“All these projects are going to run for multiple years, so we just decided it’s indefinite,” Manno said. “There are exceptions for smaller events, and it’s based on the review by the Transportation and Public Works director and myself. We look at what the impact of mobility is, other events that are already approved in that area.”

Manno noted free speech public assembly gatherings are not covered by the moratorium. A searchable list of planned street closures throughout the city is available on the Austin Center for Events website.

Manno and his staff have also set aside the hours of 9 to 11 a.m. every Tuesday to have open meeting time with event organizers and answer questions about an event they are hoping to get approved. Organizers are also able to schedule a time-certain meeting through the Austin Center for Events website.

Responding to a question about the city’s regulations and requirements for pedicab drivers during the festival, Martinez said her department’s staff will hold a meeting with the pedicab community in February to discuss those issues.

Beyond the specific downtown impacts during SXSW, the meeting also covered the requirements for large gatherings throughout the city during other tourist- and event-heavy times of the year.

Pedro Carvalho, co-owner of the Far Out Lounge concert space in South Austin, said the city’s special event permitting process is often complicated and expensive for businesses that have to take out multiple permits throughout the year. He also questioned the limit of four special event permits with sound considerations in a 30-day time period, which he said limits his capacity during SXSW and other large festivals.

“It doesn’t feel like the (Austin Center for Events) permitting is really built for something like what we have, and I was wondering if there was something more appropriate for us to apply for. We have a live music, outdoor sound permit that we apply for every year … but we run into a lot of problems,” he said. “We just keep having to pay almost $2,000 for every music permit that is outside of our capacity, which we can obviously fit because we get approved for it every time. I just don’t know how to get out from under it.”

Photo by Anna Hanks from Austin, Texas, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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