Sound Compatibility and Neighborhoods

On the FAN calendar today is a Entertainment + Sound Compatibility Engagement Meeting.

The meeting is Wed, December 5, (3:00 pm) at
Doris Miller Auditorium @ 2300 Rosewood Ave.

While city staff has invited many groups to participate, staff reached out to FAN and its member neighborhood associations specifically with the intent of including more diverse points of view.

The topic concerns how to deal with the (sometimes) competing interests of incumbent music venues and residents versus newcomers. At one point, staff had developed some recommendations that were based on “agent of change”. Agent of change placed the burden of competing interests on the newcomers. New residential developments in a neighborhood with an established music venue might, for example, be required to provide beefed up sound mitigation on their windows. Conversely, new music venues would have to take steps to ensure incumbent residents do not suffer unreasonable noise disturbances.

It is an interesting set of issues that FAN’s membership has not addressed directly. It does touch on FAN’s general theme of welcoming newcomers and positive change instead of erecting barriers (or onerous regulations that effectively prevent positive change). It also touches on the idea that a diversity of people and amenities can and should co-exist in neighborhoods, but it requires that all parties are considerate of each other.

Anyway, I encourage any and all FAN members to attend and report back to the group if they do!

Roger

If you attended the meeting, please share your thoughts. @josiahstevenson?

@josiahstevenson gave an update at last night’s FAN board meeting. Hopefully, he will summarize it here as well.

In any case, city staff sent this note:

Thank you for attending the Sound Compatibility Listening Session on Wednesday, December 5th. We certainly heard everything that each of you voiced and we are in the process of consolidating all notes. As we look to package this information and data from previous exercises, we would like to invite our attendees and/or those who weren’t able to attend the session to include any additional thoughts on each of the questions we discussed on Wednesday. You will find that the questions presented in the Sound Compatibility Survey were the same questions provided on the agenda of the Listening Session . Our hopes are to include all voices and thoughts as we focus on bringing more data to inform decision making with the group in January.

This survey will be open until Friday, December 14th, so please feel free to share with each of your respective groups or connections. ATXN is currently editing the recording of the session so we can include it on our website for the project. Until then, you are welcomed to watch and share footage via the Music and Entertainment Division’s Facebook.

I encourage FANs to answer the survey.

Roger