The Hermosa Beach City Council has dropped an effort to establish a new permit system to regulate live entertainment at Hermosa nightspots, but a majority of the council members said they might take up the effort again at a later date.
People living near the nightspots have often complained about noise and rowdiness, and the regulation of alcohol-serving establishments has been a significant issue in City Council election campaigns.
The City Council on Tuesday decided that entertainment permits were not necessary because the regulation of nightspots was recently addressed with the establishment of a new set of criteria to review alcohol-serving establishments using the conditional use permits they already must have to operate.
The city Planning Commission advised that the CUP reviews would suffice to regulate the establishments, and on Tuesday the council agreed, at least for now.
Under the new CUP review criteria, a combination of two violations of operating hours, serious crimes on the premises due to lack of security, or criminal citations of staff on the premises in a six-month period could trigger a hearing for a modification or revocation of an establishment’s conditional use permit.
However, the police chief and other officials can intervene and determine that the incidents are not serious enough to warrant the hearing.
Additional incidents that can trigger a use-permit hearing include overcrowding or violating state regulations on ratios of alcohol and food sales.
The Planning Commission studied the possibility of a separate entertainment permit system, which would have allowed officials to halt live entertainment at a troublesome establishment without taking arguably harsher measures, such as imposing earlier closing times, which can be done through the conditional use permits.
Commissioners concluded that adding a second separate review system for the nightspots would cause confusion, and noted that only about 20 establishments have live entertainment allowed within their broader conditional use permits.
Three council members signaled that if the new method of reviewing conditional use permits does not sufficiently curtail noise and rowdiness, the notion of separate entertainment permits might resurface.
Mayor Peter Tucker and Councilman Kit Bobko said the entertainment permit idea had been discussed with an eye toward regulating the tenant-proprietors of a nightspot without lowering the property value for the landlord. Tucker said foreshortened closing times for an establishment lower the value of the property.
Bobko and Councilman Michael DiVirgilio questioned whether live entertainment was being overlooked as a significant factor in potential problems with nightspots.
“I think we’ll come back to this at some point,” Bobko said.
“We can always change this again,” Tucker said.
