The Portland City Council Monday night approved a temporary moratorium on new music venue developments, effectively pausing a controversial project from a local developer and concert promotion giant Live Nation.
The project calls for building a music hall with a capacity for 3,300 people on Myrtle Street across from the Merrill Auditorium. Concert promotion giant Live Nation, along with Scarborough-based developer Mile Marker Investments, are spearheading the project.
City councilors heard more than three and a half hours of public comment on the issue Monday night, and debated the topic for nearly two more hours.
Developer Todd Goldenfarb compared the project to others that sparked debate in Portland in the past, but that the public, with time, has come around to like.
"We'll see more live music, restaurants and hotels with more customers — especially in January, February and March when we need them the most — and more life on Congress Street, which is struggling today, and more revenue for this great city," he said.
Others, including some downtown business owners, said they agreed.
City Councilor April Fournier said the moratorium will give the city time to study the impact of the new venue on Portland's creative economy, traffic and parking.
"If you want to do business with the city of Portland, I would hope that you have some flexibility and patience, as we work through some of these unknowns [and] as we contemplate and listen to this huge outpouring from our community that says hey, we're concerned," she said.
Dozens of local musicians and venue operators said the city should take more time to evaluate whether it should bring Live Nation, which is the subject of an anti-trust lawsuit and investigation from the U.S. Justice Department, into Portland.
According to the lawsuit, Live Nation has exhibited a pattern of building or acquiring control over more venues across the country, and then enticing more artists to skip independent rooms or venues affiliated with other promotion groups and tour exclusively at Live Nation spaces.
Local arts operators and musicians said they fear these practices will play out in Portland if Live Nation owns and operates its own venue in the city, and could eventually drive existing performance spaces out of business.
"We all compete with each other — that is competition — and we're all here today supporting each other as well," said musician Sonia Sturino, who also works at Portland House of Music. "What Live Nation has track record of is they're not willing to compete. They want to take over."
That, they argued, represents potential public harm to Portland's creative economy and should be studied.
But Portland Mayor Mark Dion, who was one of three city councilors who voted against the moratorium, argued that the business shouldn't matter.
"If they satisfy the conditions that are expressed in the current code, then by right, they should be able to move forward," Dion said, adding that he believed Live Nation had met municipal planning requirements.
City staff, in their own memos to the council, said they did not believe a moratorium to block the Live Nation project over parking concerns was justified. They cited the fact that cities around the country — including Portland — are eliminating minimum parking standards to encourage more walkable communities. And they pointed to a recent inventory of parking garages close to the site of the proposed music hall, which showed unused capacity.
Still, city councilors said they were swayed by the large crowd that had showed up to voice their concerns about the project.
"I didn't entirely expect to find myself in this position," said City Councilor Sarah Michniewicz.
The moratorium was approved with a 6-3 vote.
To matters more complicated, the moratorium did not receive the votes needed to pass as an emergency, and so the measure will not go into effect until Sept. 10.
That means the Portland planning board, which was scheduled to consider and potentially vote on the music venue project Tuesday night, could technically still approve the project. In that case, the project would be paused starting Sept. 10 once the moratorium goes into effect.
The moratorium will run through March 9, though city councilors can vote to lift it sooner.
