For the last ten years, all of Mount Pleasant’s ABC licensed restaurants have operated under Voluntary Agreements (VAs) that prohibit them from offering live entertainment of any kind, dictate how they may seat patrons, and restrict their ability to advertise and offer food and drink specials. The agreements were negotiated between business owners and a few members of a private citizen’s group, the Mount Pleasant Neighborhood Alliance (MPNA), without community input.
The MPNA’s VAs have deprived residents of activities and amenities they once enjoyed and the current VA regime has discouraged investment and undermined development on the neighborhood’s commercial strip. The VAs have prevented the music and cultural communities that flourish in Mount Pleasant from using local establishments as performance venues. Leaders of the MPNA negotiated these agreements with the businesses without community input, nor, even, the input of their own members. Some of the business owners were not comfortable with the Voluntary Agreements (VAs), but signed them because they did not want to risk losing their liquor licenses or incurring expensive legal fees and costly delays.
This year, an unprecedented coalition of residents, community organizations, churches and business owners came together to challenge MPNA’s domination of the liquor licensing process in Mount Pleasant. Hear Mount Pleasant was formed to restore live music in neighborhood establishments and to ensure that all residents that want to be included in the decision making process are heard.
Based on extensive feedback, including knocking on many doors and conducting significant street outreach, organizers determined that a majority of Mount Pleasant residents want a safer, more vibrant commercial strip where restaurants can serve a variety of functions such as providing family dining, community gathering places, and spaces for musicians and other artists to perform and exhibit their work.
Residents also made clear their desire for proactive community-based problem solving. The current VAs offer no mechanisms to resolve complaints. For example, when one family complained of noise, the president of MPNA simply e-mailed the complaints to the director of the Alcoholic Beverage Regulatory Administration (ABRA). ABRA inspectors then visited the establishment nineteen times but could not substantiate the complaint, noting on each occasion that music could not be heard outside the restaurant at the time of the inspection.
Hear Mount Pleasant has taken a different approach. With respect to concerns about noise, we have worked with restaurant owners and a sound engineer and have conducted sound assessments. The sound engineer documented noise emission levels and made recommendations to the business owners that will reduce noise emissions even further. For example, some of the recommendations which have already been implemented at one restaurant include installing acoustical limiting devices on the sound system, re-orienting speakers within the establishment to diminish the potential for external noise, increasing the use of insulation and sound deadening foam, and installing a new door with superior sound containment characteristics at the side entrance of the business. Volunteers from Hear Mount Pleasant worked with business owners cooperatively to make these changes and to demonstrate how proactive community-based problem solving can work in our neighborhood.
Hear Mount Pleasant has also worked with the Latino Economic Development Corporation (LEDC) to provide support to Latino business owners to strengthen management practices and improve community relations. LEDC has assigned a staff person to work closely with business owners to sustain progress.
Our approach, which focuses on problem solving, collaboration, and mutual respect lays the groundwork for the change Mount Pleasant residents and small business owners want to see. The previous approach of focusing solely on prohibitions and treating business owners as adversaries has not worked during the last ten years. Using many of the ideas from the highly respected Responsible Hospitality Institute (RHI) in Santa Cruz, California and the Live Music Taskforce in Melbourne, Australia, Hear Mount Pleasant has begun piloting community-based strategies for balancing the hopes and concerns of a wide range of stakeholders in mixed use neighborhoods like Mount Pleasant.
Out of this initial work, Hear Mount Pleasant has developed a plan that involves residents, business owners and neighborhood community agencies in addressing problems in proactive and constructive ways. We believe that strengthening communication between residents and business owners and engaging community organizations for support and technical assistance will lead to a more vibrant, harmonious and peaceful Mount Pleasant.
Our plan includes:
1) Providing ongoing training, technical support and business-to-business mentoring by local intermediaries such as LEDC, Local First DC and Mount Pleasant Main Street to help our businesses develop and strengthen community friendly business practices
2) Helping business owners undertake noise impact studies and develop individual noise management plans for live and recorded music
3) Building and maintaining strong partnerships between residents and substance abuse outreach workers, social service agencies, and police to address issues such as public drunkenness and urination that impact businesses and residents.
4) Developing an accessible business/resident communication and dispute resolution process
5) Creating more opportunities for business owners and residents to gather informally so that they can learn to know each other, begin to understand each other’s concerns and challenges and, with time, develop a level of communication and trust that has been missing for too long in Mount Pleasant
Mount Pleasant is blessed with many civic organizations, non-profits and community groups with the capacity and commitment to make this plan work.
Below is an outline of how each group will be involved and what they have agreed to do.
Mount Pleasant, isn’t it time for a positive change?