I Love The Great Morgani!: Santa Cruz City Council Meeting

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/02/24/18751473.php?show_comments=1#18751530

As much as I appreciate the Great Morgani's involvement in the performance space debate it behooves me to point out that he was ALWAYS the Downtown Business Association's 'darling child' performer allowed to violate municipal ordinances at whim, and now he has taken umbrage.

GSo I need to put this out there because I DO NOT TRUST YOU.

NO 'compromise solutions'. A rollback to the initial arrangement pre-"Public Safety 'Law' is the MINIMUM I will accept, and preferably a restoration of the ORIGINAL Street Performer's Guild voluntary guidelines. Those guidelines worked like a charm for decades, and continue to be an exemplary model, IF the city and it's overworked-by-behavior-control-laws police department would simply cooperate.

No permits.
No auditions.

No 'music quality' policies enacted by the city. Hell, they can't even come up with a state-legal standard for their noise ordinances, no less music.

No streets full of 'approved' semi-pro performers forcing aside other less-practiced musician, travelers with guitar (or accordion) trying to scrape up enough to eat, buy a new songbook, continue their trip down the road.

It takes ALL KINDS of buskers to make a scene. There MIGHT be a certain type of tourist or resident whose OK with nothing but DTA approved and perhaps paid-for semi-pro performers filling a street but I wouldn't want to live in a town where that was the 'community' expectation of what qualifies as 'street performance'.

Dear Dan,

I don't have the vaguest idea where you live (you seem to discuss Fresno a hotbed of Anarchist activity a lot). but I'VE lived IN Santa Cruz for the last 37 years and was playing on the street before and after the Street Performer's Guild voluntary guideline were in place and I can tell ya. It's NEVER been a free for all.

And Frank...
> Who are you negotiating with?

No one. That's the point.

The city didn't "negotiate" with 'the street' before they made a bunch of TRULY STUPID rules therefore I don't think counter-offers are required.

We can let the city trash it's own business community by making LOTS of space for panhandlers and hustlers to work but not much in the way of performing arts space.

But some of us actually care about "communities you live" in not "communities you buy into", and the elimination of performance space without impacting the SCOURGE OF THE SENTINEL! Panhandlers and other so-called neer do wells, seem simply counterproductive to the maintenance of a healthy thriving downtown while the latter element seem ok with continuing to hire otherwise socially useless 'private patrol security guards' as a solution to the city's stupid rulemaking.

That's the commercial property 'community'... the latter... For the most part they don't live here and don't care about things like 'viable vibrant communities' like the rest of us.

Maybe the DTA can afford to fill the street corners downtown EVERY DAY with an assortment of paid-for semi-pro musicians to attract customers? Because relying on a 3x a year influx of cash into downtown business coffers

(Specifically, when the UC students arrive at the beginning of the year, Xmas season, and the summer's 'pass-through tourists' who buy a meal... coffee... then head to Carmel, or up to the Bay area because Santa Cruz has already been stripped of almost anything worth seeing. One can see ocean and trees in a LOT of places in California)

...won't make payroll.

But the commercial property interests don't care. They can always 'fill that hole', there seems to be a lot of them at the moment, with another pier 1 store.

...I live, work and write in Fresno.

I find much of the caterwauling that goes on here amusing, in light of the reality that's elsewhere in California. People complain about the "oppression" in SC. Compared to the Central Valley it's non existent. Be thankful you live in SC.

I used to write for Independent Media and Community Alliance. However my politics have never been Far Left. I hold no brief for anarchists. Neither do I for the Far Right. The Occupy movement was as pathetic as the Tea Party is. The lowest common denominator chattering away.

Well Dan I hope you can see that I'm profoundly concerned with the sociological AND economic health of Santa Cruz. They're measured in more than property values and revenues from businesses, the two overweening things the city seems to understand as having 'value' to Santa Cruz, as they reject the parts that make Santa Cruz "Vibrant", if not world-renowned for "weird". It's going to stay weird too. The city just really needs to get on the stick about figuring our what KIND of weird it wants, Speedfreak weird, or Street Performer 'weird', and how to attain that without the influence of people who would simply settle for a failing shopping mall with more security guards than customers.

Meanwhile even as the city disingenuously claims "Public Safety" as rationale for calling a MANNED area with guitar case, a 'trip hazard', even as sandwich board signs litter the sidewalks, including having literally clogged the sidewalk at the corner of Cathcart & Pacific (Shay's Flowers... two blocks away from there, and another) forcing people to walk in the street nearby to where a man just lost his legs to a tragic bus/pedestrian accident. The signs disappeared for a week or so after that, but they're back now.

REAL concern for public safety there guys!

I even jacked up a couple of PD "BrassAsses" about it (Yes I had a witness) as they were taking a saunter down Pacific one day a month or two before that SCMTD bus mixed it up with a disabled pedestrian. They told me "The planning commission OK'd it..." so I guess the planning commission gets to over-ride STATE public safety codes by allowing motorist distractions and REAL UNATTENDED trip hazards to reside IN CROSSWALK AREAS downtown, no matter what the state laws say.

The hypocrisy is profound, disturbingly corrupt, and endangering... not only to the socioeconomic health of the community, but to the public safety the city claims while making these stupid rules that our near-demoralized PD has to enforce. They didn't at first you know. Even the rookiest cop KNOWS that those sidewalk signs are a pedestrian menace, and if I'VE seen one blind person trip on one (I have) The SCPD must see that a lot more often than I.

They're being FORCED TO. With the chain of command forcing them being (upward) the Chief of Police (a political position) → City Manager → City Council.

The corruption in the selective enforcement of the "Trip Hazard" ordinance is obvious, as obvious as the need to remove every single one of these Sycophantic motherfuckers from positions allowing them to make or enforce laws.