PALO ALTO DESK - The most popular type of business in downtown San Jose is not what the architects of the city's revival had in mind.
Shops still struggle. So do some restaurants. But go downtown around 11 at night on a weekend, and you'll find a whole class of business that's booming, in more ways than one -- and without any redevelopment subsidies.
Nightclubs throb with life until 2 a.m., and the streets are livelier some Saturdays at midnight than they are most weekdays. This leaves city officials feeling much like proud parents who set out to raise a corporate lawyer, but suddenly find themselves with a rock star: Successful, for sure -- but the noise! The hair! The earrings where there are no ears!
The next episode in this family drama will take place Tuesday, when the city council reviews a new plan to pay for policing the downtown after dark. Earlier proposals relied on nightclubs, but not hotels or other late-night entertainment spots, to pay the cost of extra police on the streets. This drew such strong protests from club owners last month that the council bounced the problem back to City Manager Regina Williams to sort out.
Fortunately, Williams has scrapped the idea of having owners pay for police protection and adopted the proposal of the San Jose Downtown Association, which represents the view of most club owners. Now the owners would hire their own uniformed security guards, and the city would pay the costs of policing the public areas, like any other neighborhood.
It sounds so simple. But the history is complicated.
This conflict started with San Jose's police auditor, who discovered that most citizen complaints about cops were directed at off-duty officers hired by nightclubs for security. The police department eventually stopped letting off-duty cops provide security, but club owners and the city wanted to keep a strong police presence downtown. That led to the plan for club owners to help pay the costs of extra police on the streets instead of hiring security guards.
This supposedly was decided with participation by the owners, but the owners say they were mostly called to meetings and told what would happen. They feel they're seen more as troublemakers than contributors to the local economy. They were reluctant to protest the new security system originally, they say, for fear that the city would retaliate by yanking their entertainment permits.
So the extra police patrols went into effect last year -- but the city never got around to billing anybody. This spring, when Williams proposed to collect, club owners weren't as shy. Some said the fees would put them out of business; some claimed they had to hire their own security despite having more cops in the area.
The new proposal restores the balance of responsibility. It means fewer cops will be downtown, since clubs will have their own guards. This worries some owners, but Lt. Tuck Younis, in charge of downtown patrols, says he's confident people won't notice the difference.
With the new plan comes a warning, however. If a club has a major incident that results from its own negligence, then the city will bill the owner for the cost of responding to the call. This might happen, for instance, if a fight breaks out and it turns out the club had fewer security guards than its permit required. An existing ordinance allows this kind of cost recovery, but it seldom has been used.
If it's applied fairly, then it's a reasonable rule, but some owners fear the police will use it too aggressively. If they do, it'll discourage even good managers from calling the cops when trouble is brewing. That would make the clubs less safe.
The element that definitely is still missing in this club-city relationship is trust. But another proposal by the Downtown Association could change that: A neighborhood council of business owners, downtown residents, police and other city officials to meet regularly and talk about problems. It's a terrific idea -- a kind of family therapy to surface concerns before they got serious, and to defuse tensions.
Nightclubs aren't huge money-makers for a city. But they meet an entertainment demand, they pay rent, and they draw thousands of young people who otherwise might not discover the downtown. Poorly run clubs are unsafe and ought to be shut down, but well-run clubs should be encouraged.
In this case, encouragement doesn't mean subsidies or incentives. It just means setting some rules, talking through problems, and then getting out of the way to let the market work.
[The editorial appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.]
