Popular SXSW events imperiled by permit limit
New 120-application cap reached days before Friday deadline.
Some long-standing events might be missing from this year’s South by Southwest week festivities after the city cut offff permit applications earlier than the previously announced Feb. 5 deadline.
A Jan. 7 statement on the city of Austin’s website about special event permits, required at nontraditional venues during SXSW, noted that the deadline for applications would be 5 p.m. Feb. 5, but it also said the city had set a cap of 120 applications this year. According to an internal memo from William Manno, the city of Austin’s special events program manager, provided to the American-Statesman by Jennifer Houlihan of Austin Music People, the city reached that cap at 6 p.m. Tuesday. The city hasn’t said how many permits will be issued.
Among those caught in the lurch is SXSW Music itself.
“(The application for) St. David’s church was 24 hours late (or 24 hours early based on the publi shed Feb. 5 deadline depending on how you
look at it),” SXSW organizers said in a statement Friday. St. David’s Episcopal Church is one of two downtown churches that has hosted popular SXSW showcases for years.
Also left in limbo was South by San Jose, a free, family-friendly event in the parking lot of Jo’s Coffee and Hotel San Jose on South Congress Avenue. Organizers turned in their permit application this week after the cap was reached.
“The city has always told us we’ve been exemplary in how we’ve engaged in the permitting process, and we’ve held this event for 16 years,” Isadora McKeon from Hotel San Jose said Friday.
Because the event has such a long history, McKeon said she didn’t feel a sense of urgency about the application beyond getting it in by the Feb. 5 deadline. “(It was) certainly not conveyed that they were reaching the maximum number” of permits, she said. “That information seems almost impossible to find anywhere, and, in fact, the city’s website continued to accept permit applications after their apparent internal cutoff decision.”
The early cutoff could lead to the cancellation of a planned 65th birthday party for Austin honkytonk hero Ray Benson. Local advertising agency GSD&M was planning to host the party along with its annual SXSW Interactive affair and a celebration of the long-running Austin TV show “Austin City Limits.”
“If the city really wants to cancel Ray’s 65th birthday, I’m sure it might bring a few tears to some people’s eyes,” David Rockwood from GSD&M said Friday.
City spokeswoman Alicia Dean said the Austin Center for Events staff, which handles the special permits, understands that this is a “new process for everybody.”
“It’s a work in progress,” she said Friday afternoon, “but we had to start somewhere.”
With the festival’s growth over the last several years, Dean said, “we couldn’t continue to process applications in the same way.”
Dean said the city has been trying to communicate the new application cap through news releases and messaging within the event planning community. “We’re going to do our best to cap it at 120, so please don’t wait till Feb. 5 to get your completed application in” has been the message all along, she said.
A press release from the Austin Center for Events on Jan. 27 announced plans to curb permits issued during the week of SXSW, which is March 11-18, by 25 percent this year. “Based on the volume of permit applications already received for events during this time period, ACE staff anticipates it will stop accepting applications in early February,” it said. “The early cut-off will give staff adequate time to thoroughly review each application for compliance with safety, traffic and sound requirements.”
Dean said there is a chance some event planners who filed their applications before the Friday deadline might get permitted, despite the application cutoff. “I do know that there is an effort to work with everyone as best as we can, particularly the legacy events here, with promoters we’re familiar with and events we’re familiar with,” she said.
McKeon said the city should take a more comprehensive approach to the permit application process, especially after recent talk about the negative impact of corporate-sponsored parties with no direct ties to the Austin community.
“We’re people who live here all the time, so we’re very conscious of the impact of our event on the community and we feel that it has tremendous value,” McKeon said. “We benefit local charities; we benefit local small businesses; we benefit local musicians.”
Rockwood said he hasn’t heard from the city beyond a note that the permitting has been shut off. He said he went ahead and submitted all his permit applications anyway.