The following is part of a commentary written by professional bubble performer Tom Noddy, who was also a street performer in Santa Cruz for many years back in August 2002. Those interested in a deeper discussion of the issue should search under "Voluntary Guidelines" or "Downtown Ordinances" for more discussion. I have taken the liberty of reposting this commentary.

A debate/discussion of Street Performers and the Downtown Ordinances between Tom Noddy and Scott Kennedy can be found in the KUSP website archives (August or September).



THOUGHTS FOR SANTA CRUZ STREET PERFORMERS

Hello, My name is Tom Noddy. I hold no official position in city government or any other disorganization. For many years I performed a puppet show as a street performer in Santa Cruz and on the streets across this and other countries. In the early '80s I helped to organize street performers here when the city tried to ban the practice of our art. Since then I've helped when
asked by performers, merchants, residents, city council members or others to address street performer issues in Santa Cruz. I'm still an entertainer (I do an act called Bubble Magic with soap bubbles) but not on the streets (a little bit of wind and I have no act at all). As a professional entertainer I travel in and out of town, sometimes for extended periods.
You may know that the City Council has recently passed some new amendments to laws that restrict street performers in Santa Cruz. The process is not finished ... some Council members have indicated that they will look for ways to soften the effects of these baffling changes while at least one is looking into ways to require permits or licenses for the right to perform downtown.
Now and again there has been confusion on the streets here regarding what laws or regulations apply to street performers and who actually knows the laws. The downtown hosts use to help with these matters but they too have become hopelessly confused and have sometimes
spread misinformation. The downtown police have stumbled on some of the complications. I have concerned myself with these issues since the late 1970s and I assure you, if you are not now confused then you really don't understand what is going on.
Let me try to give you an idea of how it looks at this moment (understand, some parts of this thing are fluid and are changing even as I write this).


THE VOLUNTARY GUIDELINES
When an effort was made to ban street performing in Santa Cruz in the late 70s the performers organized. Some wanted to fight against the merchants who were calling for a ban. Others wanted to convince them that street performing benefits the downtown.
The overwhelming support for performers from the community persuaded them to reason with us. Some merchants didn't want a ban, they would be happy with overregulation in the form of designated areas (two were suggested, both off of Pacific Avenue) & permits &/or licenses. Tom Scribner, the saw player whose street performance on musical saw has been honored with a statue downtown, was alive then & he told the merchants & city officials that he would be willing to be arrested before he would agree
to be licensed to perform for free downtown.
Instead, the performers indicated that they would be willing to help bring peace to the downtown by composing a list of voluntary guidelines for performers and that they would make that list of guidelines available to the merchants and city officials so that they could be distributed to future performers who might come to town. Our proposed guidelines were amended after negotiations with the Downtown Association (merchant group downtown). They were endorsed by the performers (35 performers came to
consensus on this agreement), endorsed by the merchants, endorsed by the neighbor organization, and editorials in several local newspapers endorsed this approach. Eventually, the conservative City Council in 1980 endorsed the agreement and the guidelines.
The agreement was that those guidelines would be used to address all performer matters that did not involve actual criminal behavior. Performers pledged to abide by that neighborly agreement and the city agreed to pass no laws to specifically regulate street performers. Naturally, street performers have always been bound by the same laws that everyone else is. Noise curfew, disturbing the peace, laws against blocking pedestrian traffic, these could all be used to deal with anyone who needed laws to help
him/her to be respectful of others downtown but first performers, merchants, police would try the more
neighborly approach. The agreement worked and city officials refrained from passing laws specifically to
regulate street performing.
City Council members came and went, performers came & went, downtown hosts came & went, downtown police officers came and went, shop owners came & went. Only a few of us who made the agreement in 1980 are still paying any attention to street performing matters in Santa Cruz (in a way, Tom Scribner is among those few). But over & over when people sat down to consider how to address the problems with street performing (or the problems with merchants who have a problem with street performing) people returned to the voluntary guidelines.
When the 1989 earthquake transformed the downtown into a pile of rubble and merchants in tents, the performers were still there bringing some smiles and some life to the streets of our town.
When they rebuilt after the quake they added to the population of elders in hotels and apartments downtown. At the same time they encouraged an outdoor scene and encouraged much more nightlife. We held a series of meetings with residents and this resulted in amending some wording to the guidelines to make the performers aware of the needs and rights of the residents (separate meetings with downtown drummers and residents resulted in another set of agreements specifically about their concerns).
When the downtown hosts became a permanent fixture on the streets they were supplied with copies of the guidelines & periodic meetings ensured that they understood the way the agreement had always worked ... they became the main outlet for getting the guidelines & the spirit of the guidelines out to the new performers & new merchants who came into the downtown.
As late as the summer of 2001 there were meetings with street performers, City Council members, police, residents, and others to address the "problem" of marimba music downtown (note: no merchants had complained, none attended these meetings). Those meetings ended with a pledge by all involved to try to use the neighborly approach to problem-solving described by the guidelines instead of resorting to a legalistic approach as a first response. Unfortunately, the legalistic approach has now
replaced that agreement.
The City Council, responding to demands by downtown merchants & others passed some very restrictive laws for the downtown. These "downtown ordinances" passed in 1994 were supposed to be about panhandling, sitting on the sidewalk, & general rudeness downtown. But one of the added bonuses was that a new law 5.43.020, was said to define street performing & political tabling as "Noncommercial
use." The same category used to regulate the placing of information tables & petitioning & other First
Amendment protected activity downtown.
These restrictive ordinances were only rarely enforced -- the community response and a court setback led city officials to back off on enforcement of the more outrageous aspects of these restrictions. Therefore, performers continued to be regulated mostly by the more flexible voluntary guidelines. Now, in 2002, the Downtown Association and the City Council have renewed the call for full enforcement of the 1994 laws and added much greater restrictions on top of them.