Memphis Council revives, limits Beale Bucks
The Memphis City Council voted 7-4 on Tuesday to revive the controversial $5 cover charge to enter the Beale Street Entertainment District, but only on an as-needed basis.
The Downtown Memphis Commission will charge the entry fee — known as “Beale Street Bucks” — whenever the DMC and Memphis Police jointly determine it is necessary to ensure public safety. The MPD and DMC will also create an “established set of criteria” to decide when the charge is necessary.
The vote settles — at least for now — a heated debate that has raged in recent years over how to prevent stampedes and crime from marring the city’s most iconic street, and resurrects the cover charge that was put on ice by the council in November 2017.
Before Tuesday’s compromise, council member Kemp Conrad had pushed for a cover charge whenever crowds exceeded 10,000 people. He argued that 22 of the 23 stampedes happened when Beale Street Bucks wasn’t in place. Others objected, preferring a charge daily to avoid the appearance of discrimination.
“If we’re going to say it’s 10,000 or more people, and the majority of the people look like me, it looks bad,” chairman Berlin Boyd said. “I mean, that’s the white elephant in the room.”
Council attorney Allan Wade said the city, if it was to win any legal challenges, needed to demonstrate a “need” for the fee before charging one to enter the public street. Arbitrarily deciding 10,000 was the threshold for charging the fee might — or might not — “pass constitutional muster.”
Instead, Wade recommended testing different solutions to overcrowding, prompting council member Bill Morrison to propose letting “the experts” set the criteria.
Reviving the entry fee was just one of the 24 recommendations in a recent study from Idaho-based security consultant Event Risk Management Solutions. Initially hesitant to approve the report, the council voted Tuesday to accept all of the recommendations.
The Downtown Memphis Commission, the Beale Street Merchants Association and Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland all supported an entry fee of some kind to reduce overcrowding on the street, which, according to the study, has a capacity of 20,000.
Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings, speaking to media earlier in the day, again urged approval of a version of Beale Street Bucks.
“The question I have is how many people have to be killed, how many people have to be stabbed, how many people have to be stampeded over, before we as a city take action,” Rallings said.