Red River music proponents see city funding as sign of support, progress

Businesses and supporters in the Red River Cultural District see the city’s recent commitment of annual funding as a milestone to provide stability for the area’s cluster of live music venues, with the hope that more policy changes are coming to help the city’s entertainment and creative economy. District stakeholders held a press conference Monday to celebrate the recent passage of a resolution providing $150,000 annually to the district, and looking ahead toward further securing the area that is seeing development moving in on all sides.

Nicole Klepadlo, executive director of RRCD, mounted a nearly yearlong push for annual city funding that is on par with other cultural districts established around the city. She said the funding signifies that the city values the district that helps to burnish the city’s reputation as a live music epicenter, even though bars and music venues typically operate on thin margins that require special economic and policy considerations to remain open.

“Policy takes patience, and we definitely are seeing the city move in the direction of supporting more policy around cultural districts. We have been at the front line specifically of crafting policy that supports the creative and music industry,” she said. “This signifies to us that we’re advancing forward, that we have a secured seat at the table, that there is so much work to be done. We view this as the opportunity to work collaboratively with the city.”

Among the main policy considerations Klepadlo and other live music advocates plan to push in 2025 is maintaining a pool of funding for venues in the city’s Live Music Fund grant program, plus moving forward with creating a cultural overlay for the RRCD that could offer incentives or requirements for preserving and making new creative space uses in new development projects in the area.

“The business model heavily relies on patrons buying tickets and spending money at the bar, and I know there are some venues across Austin that are introducing food sales or other ways or other programming to captivate more revenue generation,” she said, in reference to the increasing rent and insurance costs for nightlife and hospitality businesses. “If you look at Red River as a whole, you definitely have a lot of venues and a lot of businesses, even food trucks and restaurants, that are needing to acquire more revenue because their lease rates are higher or their insurance rates are higher.”

Also on the list are considerations related to the Waterloo Greenway project and improvement of land surrounding Waller Creek, which runs alongside many parcels within the RRCD.

That work could interact with the planned expansion of the Empire Control Room and Garage, which partially sits just west of the creek. The club, which has plans to expand in the coming years, was recently able to take ownership of the second parcel it has long occupied thanks to a loan funded by the city and administered by the economic development group Rally Austin.

“That loan was really just to stick our heels in the ground and remain a cultural and musical space in a city that’s just sort of rampant with development,” said Empire general manager Stephen Flynn. “We’re excited and feeling good about stability and planning for a long-term future. That matters to us, matters to the city, matters to an actual community that I manage gigs for and employ people and everything else. Between the funding from the city and Rally Austin, it’s much more about us kind of staking a flag.”

For clubs like Mohawk, the cooperation among neighboring venues has helped bring stability and some needed predictability for everything from managing biannual free festivals throughout the district to dealing with utilities or infrastructure concerns that require city intervention.

“We really are stronger together collectively and getting sort of these answers and things we need on a quicker basis than we do if I reach out to the fire marshal or whatever. … We really are in this all together,” said Heather Kaplan, Mohawk’s marketing director.

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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