Assembly Select Committee on Downtown Recovery

All right, we are going to get started. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to today's hearing of the Select Committee on Downtown Recovery. I'm the Chair of Assemblymember Matt Haney, and the title of this hearing is Revitalizing California's Downtowns through the Nightlife Economy.

I want to thank all of our attendees here, Members, guests, and everyone who has traveled both near and far to participate in this conversation. We also have a number of folks who are going to be joining us remotely and also other folks who are watching this remotely as well.

I know our Committee Members, many of them are traveling up here from Los Angeles, but they are. Or from Southern California, but are very excited to watch this hearing and be able to process with all of us some of our conclusion we formed this select Committee with a simple but urgent question that remains urgent today.

What can we as policymakers do to help California's downtowns recover in the aftermath of the Covid19 pandemic? Across the state, downtowns are still struggling. Office vacancies remain, high foot traffic is uneven, and many small businesses, particularly those dependent on evening and weekend activity, have yet to fully recover.

The traditional 9 to 5 model that our cities once relied on has fundamentally changed and it is not coming back in the same way. And what we learned is that over the past several years through visiting now for myself and other Members of this Committee, 14 different downtowns across the state. Downtowns still matter.

They still are the engines of both the economic activity across our state, but also the community activity, the cultural activity, the ways in which our state leads with creativity and innovation. So much of that relies on dynamic and active and robust downtown activity.

And because we know that the old ways of doing things, where we had a set of people who came in from 9 to 5 into our city centers and provided a sort of a base of activity to support small businesses both during the day and evening and night.

And that we were going to see continued growth in those opportunities for our cities, that that reality has fundamentally changed. There's also tremendous urgency in rethinking and reimagining what our cities and our downtowns are going to look like now and moving into the future.

And what we know is that cities both here in California and across the world that are investing in their nightlife economies in activities that aren't solely 9 to 5 that are both weekend and evening and night, are ones that are doing better. They're recovering faster here in our state.

They're bringing people back downtown through culture, entertainment, food, music and nightlife.

And they're giving People, experiences and community that make them want to be in our cities and want to build businesses and want to come for conventions and want to come stay in our hotels and want to spend money in our restaurants and support thriving, dynamic cities which have to have a thriving, dynamic downtowns.

So we talk a lot in this building about things that happen during the day. This hearing is about the very important, critical, essential activities that happen in the evening and the night.

The nightlife economy is responsible in our state, without a doubt, for tens of billions of dollars in revenue, hundreds of thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of small businesses, and the work of building a thriving, dynamic, sustainable nightlife economy and and nightlife community requires action and intentionality both at the local level and at the state level.

We're going to hear today from small business owners and city leaders about the real impacts of the pandemic on nightlife and downtown economies. We're going to hear how cities like San Francisco are using nightlife as a recovery tool and where local efforts may run up against the limits of state policy.

We'll hear from transportation, tourism and major event partners about the role nightlife plays in supporting large scale economic activity. And we'll hear from other cities and even other countries that have taken intentional, data driven approaches to nightlife policy and seen meaningful economic and public safety outcomes as a result.

We also know that smart policy, where we intentionally think about regulation and permitting and public safety, is working. It is both capable of protecting people and their participation in the nightlife economy and nightlife culture.

And it is also capable, when done right, to help nightlife businesses and nightlife communities grow safely and in ways that increase their effectiveness and also increase the number of people that they can serve and the revenue that they generate. Regulated, coordinated and planned for nightlife can be safer, more inclusive and more economically productive.

So we unfortunately had to have this at 10am the building doesn't allow for committees held at 10pm but one of the messages that we wanted to send today is that there's no reason to be afraid of the dark.

In fact, when the sun goes down, there is so much that happens that is economically and culturally important and essential to the people and communities that we represent. They rely on it, they love it. They meet their friends, their partners. They come and work in our cities because of it. They come to California because of it.

They invest in our state because of it.

And we have a responsibility to make sure that it can grow and it can grow safely and that our policies here in this building support, especially right now, as our cities are struggling to recover still after the pandemic, the growth and sustainability of this most critical sector of our economy and state.

So we're going to have three panels, but before I formally begin, I have a few housekeeping items. We will have three panels today. Witnesses for each panel will come forward together and testify in the order they are introduced.

As I mentioned, a number of the panelists are going to be participating remotely, as well as some of the Members of the Committee will be remote. Each panelist will have set time for opening remarks followed by questions from Committee Members. At the conclusion of this hearing, there will be an opportunity for public comment in the hearing room.

Public comment will be limited to 30 seconds per person. We are not accepting public comment by phone today, but written testimony may be submitted to the [email protected], which is also listed on our website.

I will also say before we bring up the first panel, we do believe that this is the first time that anything like this has happened in the state Capitol, that there has been an intentional, robust, comprehensive discussion about the California's nightlife economy and nightlife communities and what we need to do here with public policy to support that economy and that sector.

The outcome of this, we hope, will be public policy changes, legislation introduced, budget initiatives. Last year, we launched a package of downtown recovery bills.

We hope we plan to do that again this year and pursue some of the legislative and budget changes and investments that are needed that come as a result of the conversations that we have today.

So with that, I want to invite our first panel, which will be focused on nightlife policy as a tool for economic recovery, to join us at the table. And virtually, are they all virtual or okay? zero, yes, of course.

We have three panelists, Michael Fishman, who is an associate professor of practice, University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design, who will be remote Ben Van Houten, who is the Director of Nightlife Initiatives from the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and Darcy Drollinger, the owner of Oasis, which is a nightlife venue, who is here with us in person.

So should we have Darcy come here? And we're starting, I believe, with Michael. Okay. So. And I want to thank Assemblymember Crell, who's here with us in person. And Assemblymember Kara will be joining us shortly in person. And then we'll have a number of our other Committee Members who will be here remote.

So I will turn it over first to Professor Fishman. Are we. We don't have the sound there or is he on mute?

Can the Assembly Members hear me? We can now. Yes. Okay. Thanks very much. Thanks. Chair Haney, Members of the Select Committee, thanks for your invitation to address the group. I have some prepared remarks that are brief in nature, maybe five or seven minutes. My name is Michael Fitchman.

I'm an Associate Professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, Department of City and Regional Planning. I work with municipalities and communities around the globe on issues of policy and planning for nighttime cities and creative economies. And I helped design and found Philadelphia's nighttime economy office in my home city of Philadelphia.

I do research consulting on data, economics and policy related to cities at night, consulted with Nashville, Amsterdam, Sydney, Tokyo, Montreal, among other cities. And I teach an urban planning graduate course on nighttime cities here at the University of Pennsylvania.

I'm often in touch with my colleagues in California, such as Mr. VanHouten, who's also on this panel about issues of mutual concern. And I've been fortunate enough as a music professional 25 years to get to DJ and record in the great state of California. And I always love visiting.

So I was asked to share some observations regarding lessons in policy and planning that California could learn from other jurisdictions. The most notable trend in urban nighttime over the last decade has been the rise of governmental night managers, or nightmares, as they are called. There are dozens more worldwide every year.

These are people who are specifically empowered to use economic development or regulatory tools to promote and manage a safe and creative nighttime city, often by using negotiation and engagement with their stakeholders.

And what this means is that the centuries old quote unquote culture of no that dominated cities approach to nighttime is changing to something that's more proactive and curious.

Nighttime activities were often seen as strictly a source of trouble, but now there's acknowledgement that Every city is 24 hours and amenities and activities of night culture are worth caring for as assets of social and economic value.

Having more of these offices around the world, and we have some of these officers here joining us today, means that there's a bigger menu of ideas that California municipalities can choose from when they're looking for ways to engage nighttime activities.

As far as trends, it's now understood that nighttime is an important part of the economic picture of a city. There are a lot of different studies about nighttime work and nighttime consumption, and they all fall within the range of 10 to 25% of measured activity going on, usually depending on the city and the method.

But between 6pm and 6am in cities, and this isn't just in Leisure industries, transportation, logistics, delivery services, public safety, healthcare. They actually make up the bulk of what's going on at night in a city. According to census microdata and analyses of these data, these night workers tend to earn less than their daytime counterparts.

They have worse outcomes in mental and physical health, and they're more poorly served by municipal services, especially transportation. And many of these night offices are giving increased focus to workforce needs. Leisure industries are a central piece of nighttime urban culture. They create a lot of excitement and vitality in a city.

They're so important for community social function and, and there's a lot of dialogue going on right now about how changing habits and social activities, trends in music and entertainment, business models, labor costs, changes in alcohol consumption are affecting demand for for nighttime leisure.

Recent work that my research team was doing in Amsterdam suggests that there's actually still really strong demand, despite what you might hear, for nighttime cultural activities. But people are very cost sensitive and this has a lot to do with difficulty in transportation, inputs to labor, and so on. Changing the business models.

One other source of, I think, concern about what's going on in nighttime economies currently is that physical spaces for creativity, art and social life are really precarious. So music venues, clubs, restaurants are being threatened by high costs that jeopardize their existence and minimize what they can invest in programming.

And this is what my research partners and I call the cost programming trade off. Well intentioned music, food, ambiance aren't just the fruits of a creative culture. They're also key tools to minimize antisocial behavior that's often associated with nightlife.

So for example, like a patron who's really invested in the music program at a particular club is probably less likely to engage in public misbehavior that jeopardizes that club's relationships with neighbors and might lead to complaints.

In looking at thousands of venue level data points across nine global cities, my research group and I we've seen that the likelihood of creative programming that's experimental or community focused programming decreases when land costs are higher. Creative businesses still want to have access to good locations.

And that often means downtowns being in places where transportation is good and there's generally good access and good zoning. But corporate entertainment players are out competing some local entrepreneurs for desirable locations. We saw in studying Nashville that independent venues were choosing lower access, cheaper locations to try to keep their margins. And these.

But these venues are critical incubators of creativity in a city. Major artists start in independent music venues, not in major sports arenas. And so from California's perspective. I see this as being somewhat of a similar problem to that in in housing.

And the Nashville example doesn't necessarily generalize well to a more highly regulated place like my home city of Philadelphia or California. But in Philadelphia we've seen an overall decline in the number of Assembly license, restrictive zoning, expensive real estate, complicated approvals processes make it really difficult to form these independent creative businesses.

Some of the unintended results include excluding lots of different communities from ownership and management. It includes the emergence of unregulated, non code compliant nightlife spaces and you see the competitive edge for the corporate players emerging. Lastly, something from Philadelphia where I'm a formal advisor to the Nighttime Economy Unit.

My colleague Raheem Manning will be joining us later and I'm a Committee co chair on the City Council Music Policy Task Force is that we've seen we've had a couple ideas that have that have worked pretty well. Our nighttime office. It's designed to coordinate stakeholders in licensing, public safety, economic development and as a growing portfolio of programs.

It has a dedicated vehicle to care for nighttime issues in the government, including transportation, workforce issues. We've recently been able to publish an economic study which I can share with you and a strategic overview as we prepare to host the World Cup Major League All Star Game and the Nathan Nation's 250th birthday party this summer.

And our state Legislature Legislature is exploring extension of closing hours for alcohol service for this particular summer.

And that's something that maybe Rahim can comment about later as it might relate to California made significant investments in venue safety, training, coordinating small grants to local artists, and we're carefully studying new zoning and licensing reforms in cities like Austin, Texas to see how more land can be unlocked for nightlife creativity and live music.

So I've provided I can provide the Committee with some documents if there's any interest in some of the data details or anything like that from my remarks related to Nashville or Philadelphia study. But thank you very much for your time. I'm looking forward to this discussion and to hear from my colleagues.

Thank you so much professor, and appreciate that broad overview and all of your work. And for you joining us, I'm going to keep the panel going so I have everyone provide their comments first and then we'll open for questions after that.

We're now going to turn it over to somebody that many of us know well and have worked with for a long time, Ben Van Houten, who is the Director of Nightlife Initiatives from the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, who's also.

Thank you. Thank you, Chair Haney. Good morning to you and the Committee Members. Ben Van Houten from the Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

I am so sorry I can't be there in person today, but really appreciate the opportunity to speak with so many great colleagues and to be a part of an unprecedented conversation in the statehouse about the importance of nightlife as part of our economy.

I've been working for the city and county of San Francisco since 2013, when I became the first person to look at San Francisco nightlife through an economic development lens. In the intervening years, as Michael spoke about, this field, now known as nighttime economy management has grown and evolved significantly.

And I've also been fortunate to serve as a founding board Member of the nighttime economy, Culture and Policy alliance, which is a professional association supporting this emerging area of study.

I think in your opening remarks, Chair Haney and Michael as well set the table quite well about the principles of nighttime economy management, that nightlife is a vital part of a thriving city, downtown and across neighborhoods and cities.

And as we all continue to navigate post pandemic challenges, a healthy nightlife ecosystem will be really vital to ensure that cities like San Francisco can continue their comeback and prosper moving forward. And, you know, hearings like this are a critical step in imagining new resources, new policy reforms, new possibilities to make that happen.

My role was created out of a 2012 economic impact study that identified a $4.2 billion annual economic impact from San Francisco's nightlife sector and that it employed 48,000 people. Our latest estimates put the economic impact around 7 billion and 54,000 employees as of 2023.

All of that research, and again, this evolving field, have underscored the importance of nightlife to state and local tax revenues, to local food and beverage manufacturers and distributors, to our artists, our entertainers, to tourism, to attracting workers and residents to our cities and giving visitors a reason to return.

You know, I am proud of the fact that there is nightlife all across San Francisco, but certainly its resilience and its growth is critical to downtown's comeback. And that's been made very clear under Mayor Lurie's leadership. We're doubling down on arts, nightlife and entertainment as key as economic and cultural drivers.

Over my tenure with the city, we have done critical local work. Zoning changes to allow entertainment more places, permitting reforms to support small businesses and special events. The city's adopted tax policy changes that support nightlife industries, making it easier to get loading zones for live music and entertainment venues. At the same time, while the local Work continues.

State partnership is vital here, which again really makes this hearing so important. A number of initiatives that we have been fortunate to be working on are out of state legislative successes and work with state legislators like the chair.

Entertainment zones, the ability for bars and restaurants to walk drinks outside their premises to support outdoor arts and cultural activation have been incredibly successful in San Francisco.

We were the first city in the state to be able to do entertainment zones and I like to think that we are now considered a statewide model of how to do them.

We have 16 entertainment zones across the city that have had at least one event and many more in the perpetual pipeline as communities and stakeholders again downtown and across the city.

And I should say that downtown is where we piloted entertainment zones to great success, drawing thousands of people to signature events on our front street entertainment zone and elsewhere.

I have spoken personally with stakeholders from I believe a dozen California cities at this point interested in learning about the San Francisco model of how to launch an entertainment zone. Later this year we will be rolling out our new hospitality zone liquor licenses which were created under SB395 last year.

That's 20 new liquor licenses within the downtown core to support new restaurants, new nightlife activities in downtown San Francisco. That's a innovation we took from past legislation to create new licenses in our outer commercial corridors. And the successes there in supporting entrepreneurship and new opportunities led to the mayor backing SB395 last year.

I also want to note the continued success of the type 90 music venue liquor license which again was created through state legislation.

Working with state leaders like Senator Wiener and and also with Neva's California chapter music venue advocates to create a new type of affordable liquor license that San Franciscans are accessing with new privileges without forcing venues to try to fit a restaurant or bar category so that they can host all ages concerts.

The Type 90 is truly a game changer and I want to thank ABC for their partnership in the implementation of this entertainment zones and actually everything I'm going to talk about. I really deeply appreciate their collaboration in making these programs successful.

And then finally just want to note on the on the recent wins, AB 1775 of course Chair Haney, your bill to enable cannabis cafes. We are doing important work to see that happen in San Francisco.

At the same time, the challenges that that Michael identified, you know as well as I would add, I don't know that you mentioned insurance costs. Certainly another one, you know, inflation and the challenges to get patrons to spend money in our nightlife establishments. Those are critical challenges and the need for innovation is urgent.

I'm excited to see in my work opportunities for nightlife to collaborate more deeply with other fields. I think that the intersection of nightlife and culture advocacy, a lot of people now call it night culture because of that important work in the culture space and the intersections of nightlife with the creative economy as well.

The Creative Economy work group at the state level has done some really great work to think about creative economy, and I think there's a lot of intersection in that work with nightlife.

To highlight a couple quickly a couple city projects that are in that space, the mayor recently launched the SF Live Arts Calendar and Marketing Campaign, which is an effort that has brought together everybody from the smallest rock venues to institutions like the symphony and the theaters and dance institutions, to around one marketing campaign to elevate all of the great live arts happening in San Francisco.

We recently concluded, just yesterday, SF Music Week, which intersected venues and studios and labels and all of the different parts of the music economy. And during Music Week, we released a San Francisco slice of data from the National Independent Venue Association's State of Live report showing that local independent music venues contribute $1.4 billion to our economy.

Even though only 36% of those venues were profitable as of 2024, which is the same number that nationally they reported profitability and actually outpaced California statewide Data. Statewide, only 31% of venues in California reported profitability. Appreciate the time in terms of hitting some highlights of what the state can continue to do.

I just want to elevate some ideas and models that industry stakeholders have raised with us. Things that, that I know folks in the industry have been thinking about, certainly additional liquor license reforms, thinking about extended weekend service hours. Like Chair Haney, you have been and always keeping an eye out for other reforms.

I think additional state nightlife coordination. You know, as I mentioned, we've been speaking with a dozen cities about entertainment zones and the and how to think about them and implement them. I don't think that's a role for ABC to be doing.

I appreciate their partnership, but I think additional coordination among cities around nightlife work would be very valuable. And then also thinking about possibilities for tax reform and other sorts of other areas where the state could deliver a catalytic impact to support our arts and entertainment economy. Other jurisdictions have artistic income tax exemptions.

In places like Texas, there is a music venue incubator rebate program that rebates sales tax proceeds to arts and entertainment venues, property tax incentives. There are measures for historic properties through a historic preservation lens. We could also think about that through a cultural space preservation lens.

And finally, a number of venues have talked about furthering the intersection between cannabis and alcohol service in order to really round out what they offer for what their patrons are asking for. I really appreciate the time, Happy to answer any questions. But, yeah, thank you very much.

Thank you. And though we couldn't have you up here in Sacramento, it's good to see you with the best city in the world behind you there.

And I'm biased, of course, but doing incredible, incredible work in San Francisco around nightlife for many years, and appreciate the role that you've taken also in helping advocate and support other cities and state policy changes as well.

All right, I am going to now turn it over to our panelists here, Darcy, who is here with us in person, who is one of our city's most treasured and premier nightlife champions and business owners, owner of the Oasis nightclub, among many, many other roles of supporting culture, community, and nightlife in our city and beyond, especially for the LGBTQ community.

And I will pass it over to you Dracy.

Thank you very much and thank you for having this hearing and thank you for inviting me to speak. Yeah. My name is Darcy Drollinger and I own the Oasis. I've owned and operated the Oasis for 11 years. I also like to think of myself as the artistic Director.

We have upward of 28 employees and we employ over 500 performers a year. Last year, we did 342 events. We are open from 7pm until 2 or 3, depending. So we are a hybrid space. We spend the first part of our evening with theater and cabaret, and then we move into nightclub events.

And so we have a real cross section of audience Members. We have struggled after the pandemic, and we pulled out every stop. We raised our ticket prices as far as we could, we raised our drink prices as far as we could, and we almost had to close three times.

And each of those times, the last time came five days before we were closing, where the community Members showed up and bailed us out, which is a real testament to how important this is not just for performers, but also local audiences and has become a real hub for out of town performers and a destination spot for tourists.

And, you know, I am very proud of what we do. We also support a lot of marginalized artists that don't have a platform. And beyond just giving them a platform, we work very hard to elevate them and give them a chance.

To really shine like they often don't ever get. So I'm proud of what we do. And even with all of our events and all of our sale ticket sales between the drop off on people coming out the, I mean insurance is crazy now, the inflation in terms of actual just products has know, put us to the brink.

And you know, I have had to invest my own money to keep us going each time. And when the money ran out we had to close. And again I am grateful to that. And we have tried everything and the idea of extended hours at the bar feels very crucial to me.

And after trying so many other things to stay afloat when I've watched so many other venues and music venues close, it feels like this is an opportunity for the small nightlife business owner to be self sustainable, to actually be able to help solve this issue.

And I, you know, I know it's a, an hour and a half more, two hours more but we, we survive on such a thin margin that if we have one bad week our month is shot.

If we have one bad month, our year is, you know, we're in the hole and we can't ever get back because it's such a thin margin.

So any opportunity to not just put a band aid on what's happening to all of us, but to actually help us so we can sustain ourselves and not be having to beg the people that are already spending all the money coming to save us each time is crucial.

And I know some people, I have reasons why they don't like this idea. But I lived in New York for 13 years and we self regulated and showed up to work every day. You know, not everyone is going to be up until 4 in the morning.

And you know, if it's worked this long in New York, I know it can work in San Francisco. And I think if we don't do something like this very, very soon, we're gonna lose all of the independent nightlife venues and it's only gonna be the big players and then we're gonna lose the culture in the community.

And I worry about that not just for San Francisco, but every metropolitan city in the country right now. And you know, some places do have nightlife is different everywhere.

But I can only speak to San Francisco and it has been a real challenge and you can't help train people to come out more if you don't give them the opportunities to come out.

So you know, we're all working so hard and not just me, my business partners, the staff, the performers and our audiences to try and try and solve this. And if the, if the state could help us, that would be a real godsend for all of us.

Well, thank you so much. And we are all so happy that the Oasis will be stay open. And as you, as you described it is really so much more than a business or a venue. It's a home, it's a community.

It's a place where people see themselves, where they connect with others who they may share similar priorities or identity or interests and also meet people across difference and experience culture. And it is a critical and essential part of not only our economy, but of our community and our identity as cities and as California.

It brings so many people here and it keeps them here. And I think folks often just assume it'll always be there. But what we have and you describe is if most of your business is coming from weekends between 7pm and 2am That's a really hard way to run a business.

And, and when we've seen a lot of folks who are not coming as much in 9 to 5, that affects the happy hour business, it affects the weekday business.

So then it's that much more important that you're able to make up those margins, those very slim margins during those hours that that, that you are able to be open. I wanted to, I'm just going to, I swear I'm not going to not every question I'm going to ask about is going to be about extended last call.

But I do want while we have also Professor Fishman here, I did want to ask because you've really looked at this from a research lens and across the world and now it sounds like Pennsylvania is considering an extended last call.

I wonder if you could share a bit more about that for us in terms of how you look at that from a research lens and, and maybe what you're seeing in other places and the importance of this particular issue for California and for other states and cities. We have considered it a number of times.

There's now a bill in front of the Legislature that would extend last call for cities that want to do it within particular zones just on Fridays and Saturdays and holidays. Can you share with us a bit more of your perspective on this hours question

and then yes, certainly. Thank you for the question. There have been a variety of approaches to hours extension and there's some research about what the effects might be. In Philadelphia, we explored this with an economic consultant and there was a forecasted uptick in tax revenue with, you know, sales taxes and liquor taxes and things like that.

Some of the pushback in the era of high cost tends to come in the form of venue owners who are concerned about the high costs of staffing and whether the demand and the protect will be there to meet the staffing needs. But the.

The sort of more creative approach is one which you might see in Europe where there's a little more of like a. I'd say if you look at a Berlin, for example, there's somewhat more of a laissez faire perspective. If people want it, then you will be open for that.

No one's saying that you have to be open perpetually. You're able to choose something that suits you a little better. And there's been a lot of thought given to the location where licenses of this nature are appropriate.

A place to look for that is Amsterdam, for example, where they thought about how to manage the public spaces where the closing hours were extended or to be more selective about places where there's less likely to be conflict.

And I think one of the benefits that might not be obvious to extending closing hours is that you can decongest some of those difficult pain points for public safety in nightlife districts where people might be pouring out into the street at a specified hour or consuming alcohol in a way that's not necessarily safe because they feel they're under some sort of time pressure.

So the public health related conversation about it cuts across a few different subjects. There are definitely negative public health ramifications to there being more alcohol consumption. But there's also management approaches that have been successfully tested in a lot of different cities.

And one of the more reasonable arguments you might hear is that when you build more roads, you necessarily have more crashes. But that doesn't necessarily mean that building a road is in and of itself a bad idea.

I think that maybe some of our colleagues from the UK might have interesting comments about this later because the UK has thought very deliberately about whether the continental European model of licensing and dealing with alcohol service is, you know, the right move for them. That's a conversation that's gone back 25 years there at this point.

So there are a lot of interesting experiments with this, which there's an appendix to the Philadelphia Economic Impact Study that details a handful of these different approaches that you might be able to take a look at after the hearing.

Great, thank you so much for that and I appreciate those comments.

Also, one of the other things that maybe we'll talk about as we bring other panelists, if you don't provide for the regulated, safe, monitored, great business owners who know how to make sure their customers are looked after and supported when they're out late at night, whether that's until two or later.

It's not necessarily that folks just go home. They go to unregulated, unpermitted, often unsafe, where other types of bad activities, where they don't have regulated security, where they're not accountable. We don't know where they are always. So police don't know how to monitor them effectively. So it's not like folks just go home at 2.

I know that's shocking. But they often go to other places, maybe house part other things where other types of bad things can happen because there's not the sunlight and the accountability that happens for a business owner who's responsible to their people. We also have places that are already permanent, as you said, to go to three or four.

Currently you just have a much harder time making revenue during that time because you can't serve. So that means that we're already doing this safely and in a regulated way, allowing folks to stay open. We're just not letting you make much money during that time. So that, that is an experience that we have currently already.

So I'll open this up to my colleagues. Assembly Member Kalra.

Yeah, thank you Mr. Chair and I got here a few minutes after you start us. Just want to thank you Mr. Chair, for holding this hearing and for your travels around the state, really helping to educate us and illuminate us on what's going on in our various downtowns.

And very interesting to hear the conversation that's already happening with our speakers. I have a couple comments and then just kind of a General question. First of all, I remember Oasis from San Jose back in the day. So say Oasis.

It brings back different kinds of memories for me, which was great, you know, I mean there's, we have some really vibrant, wonderful downtowns in our state, but they are struggling for a lot of different reasons, some of which we can control.

And as Mr. Jarland was talking about kind of the, the, the thin margins you think about, especially nightclubs, it's all, you know, yes, they might be open from six or seven until two, but it's really only a 23 hour period where it's really a capacity.

Typically, you know, 10pm to 1, maybe if you're lucky, you get 23 hours. That extra hour you're talking about 2530 plus percent more of operational time to generate revenue. So it's a huge amount. Where I know some people might say, zero, just one extra hour. Two.

Well, it's a big deal for those types of businesses and makes a huge deal. And so I'm really interested, as was mentioned, learning to hear a little bit more from New York and London.

I know that when you go to New York and Amsterdam, any of these things, it's not like every place is open to 4am it kind of becomes organically. You know, some businesses are going to close earlier, some to have capacity will stay later.

Not every patron wants to be out till 4am and so it kind of, we have to have, to the chair's point, we have to have some trust, faith in our operators, in our law enforcement, faith in our patrons and our community.

And the idea that everyone gets pushed out at 1:30am 2am Onto the streets, that's not exactly a great public policy to have. And I think that staggering it organically, I think can really create both vibrancy and safety for the community. One thing that Professor Fishman mentioned, briefly mentioned was transportation.

But I think that's critically important because sometimes we look at transportation in terms of ridership, but later at night, like I when I was on the BTA and I was sharing it and stayed overnight on the 22, which is a 24 hour bus line from San Jose to Palo Alto.

And I was doing it to see the number of unhoused that were on the bus. But a kind of unintentional consequence me doing that is I learned a lot about the crowd that was taking the bus at that time.

2am bus from Palo Alto to San Jose, full of servers, you know, barbacks, dishwashers, heading back to where they can actually afford to live Back in East Palo Alto. We have to think about the workers in the economy that keep this economy coming.

When we think about decisions on how do we keep a public transit system, do we just shut it down at 12 because most of the patrons are going home, or do we think about those workers and what they need to actually get back to where they live, which is usually not where they're near where they're working.

And the last thing just kind of the General comment slash question was what I've noticed is that especially coming out of the pandemic, less people working in the downtowns, what have you, a lot more creativity, which has been great in San Francisco, San Jose and all these different cities doing a variety of activities.

Some bring families into downtowns and especially given that the younger generation is saying to drink less, but they still want activities that are diverse activities. You know what, I don't know if there's any thoughts on kind of what kinds of activities we're seeing that are attracting a diverse set of folks.

Certainly some folks might want to go to a bar and have a drink, but I think we're going to need more than that to keep our nightlife kind of active.

Yeah. If any of the folks want to weigh in on this sort of the diverse set of opportunities, maybe not involving alcohol or open to families or. I mean, when we talk about the nightlife economy, it's not just bars and clubs only.

I don't know if you have it. I mean, I mean, we aren't all ages, so we can't let families into the bar, but we do. I mean, we are, we're a, we're more mostly an entertainment venue and we do everything from. We did an immersive sing along Jurassic park musical that was a huge hit.

And you know, and that's not just an LGBT audience. That is across the board, a real San Francisco audience. We do a lot of, we do theater, we do these cabaret acts that really bring in diverse groups of people.

And we've worked, we've gotten grants from the city to do them and we have been asked to be, you know, we, we did a room at moma for their gala. We, we work with outside lands and put on a stage there. So we have a lot of different opportunities.

People want what we, what we do and when we can take it outside of, of the venue, we're able to do that. But you know, we, we work very hard. We have to because we can't market to the same people. They're not going to come back night after night after night. Right.

So I do think it's in, it's in everyone's best interest to be able to figure that out. We also learned that we can make fabulous non alcoholic cocktails. And because a lot of people don't drink anymore.

And so we, and it makes them happy to feel like they can, they can sit around and have a drink in a martini glass. It's delicious. And they'll pay the prices for them too. So that has been.

That was some learning on part, but we really saw, you know, for what all the different reasons why people aren't drinking. So yeah, you have to adapt maybe. Mr. Van Houten.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you. And first off, congrats to Darcy again on the success and the continued Oasis activities. Just great. And. But to.

On the question, I think I would take a both and strategy that we need a thriving set of accessible outdoor activations, creative things happening on our streets and sidewalks, and also work hard to direct People ultimately into our existing performing arts venues and theaters, the folks who are really already serving as critical arts culture entertainment hubs.

So you know, we know that the success of events like downtown first Thursdays and other block party style events, many of which happen in our entertainment zones, are absolutely bringing people to the city and then where they will then go to a bar or restaurant afterwards.

And just to highlight that entertainment zones, while they do allow for people to walk drinks outside, they also allow families and they're great, they can be great family events.

Many of our entertainment zone events start with a family focused content chunk in the early afternoons and then as the evening shifts that offering and the vibe shifts toward more of a after work grown ups only sort of vibe. But anyway, I think it's, I've been really impressed by all the creativity.

It's one of the reasons why I think it's so important for us to support outdoor event, permit streamlining, make it as easy as possible for people to do cultural event activities at all different sizes.

Certainly thinking about ways that we can invest in infrastructure, cultural infrastructure to support creative outdoor activations, you know, lower the barriers to entry by having outdoor spaces with speakers and other equipment. There are permanent speakers being installed in our Union Square that I'm very excited about as part of that sort of effort.

So yeah, I think it's a. I think we need all different forms of nightlife and we need to. And daylife and arts and entertainment and encourage as many people as possible to find the version of that that feels right and right for them.

Professor Fishman?

Yes, thanks. I would add to what my colleagues have said in saying that I think there's just a greater demand for flexibility in commercial spaces, nighttime and daytime.

I mean the, the existing models for successful use of a commercial space are changing office work and you know, putting goods in a space and retailing them, those things are on the wane and doing activities that's on the rise and the types of activities people might want to do, you know, that's evolving as well.

But the way that a lot of municipal, excuse me, municipal codes are written is very narrow in terms of use.

And one of the things that can really make a business more resilient and successful if they want to offer cultural programming and activities at night, is that they can cross subsidize those programming elements of their business by doing other things in the space. That's something that we saw in the pandemic.

Really help people pull through where you might have a performance venue. And now they're doing some you know, they're also retailing some, like, local craft goods or they're doing some, like, TV broadcast stuff or, you know, people were very creative in what they did.

And if you're able to be a cafe with your floor space during some hours and then do, you know, some creative programming at night, it might be more advantageous for some businesses, but it's not always narrowly within the terms of what they're allowed to do.

And so some critical examination of zoning codes and permitting can help open that up if you're thinking more towards performance orientation of just safety standards and sound standards and things like that and being less narrow about exactly what the activities are.

Thank you. Thank you to all three of you for your incredible work and advocacy and for joining us. And I'm sure we will have a lot more to do together. And we can all meet at Oasis next time and celebrate over a mocktail. I'm gonna go and try those.

And thank you so much again to all three of you for your incredible work. And we'll be in touch. All right. Thank you, Darcy. All right. Thank you. I'm gonna bring up our second panel. We have a jam packed agenda here, but an amazing all around. Just so much to cover here.

And a lot of the issues that were brought up in that panel we will continue to talk about here. Mary Conde, senior vice President of Another Planet Entertainment. Nicholas Johnson, the Director of Public Policy of Lyft. Amelia Zamani, the Director of Government affairs and Public Policy.

And we are focused here in this panel on making California a global travel tourism destination. I also, just as we're bringing up this panel, I did, I did want to say we don't have a nightlife patron panel, but obviously that's something that a lot of the folks here participate in in various ways.

I do want to say, and it dovetails with what some of the closing remarks there and Assemblymember Kara's question.

I think for a long time there was a lot of assumptions about the behavior or the type of people who go out in the evening or night, as though there was something that was sort of uniquely dangerous about that or something that should be frowned upon.

This is something that Californians of every age group, of every background, of every community participate in currently, and they want to participate in, to be able to have places to go with their families, with their kids, different types of activities.

And what we've seen in San Francisco at least, is that these larger events, these downtown first Thursdays, larger street festivals, they are remarkably safe, well organized. There's actually A lot of safety and community that comes when we bring people outside together.

And so it's something that we should be encouraging and we should not be afraid of being pro people of all ages and backgrounds having places to go together in community when the sun goes down. So with that, I will now turn it over to our panel. I want to start with. There's a different order on here.

Mary Conde, who's the Senior Vice President of Another Planet Entertainment, will start us off. Welcome.

Thank you. Thank you for having me here. I appreciate this. I'm with Another Planet Entertainment, and we are a company of independent promoters that started in 2003, based in the San Francisco Bay area.

Our main office is in Berkeley, and then my office is in San Francisco at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, right across the street from City Hall. We are notable in being an independent promoter because the big players in our realm are multinational companies and they. They really control most of the concert going.

Most of the tickets sold are through our larger competitors. We are very consciously involved in the Bay Area entertainment scene. We operate a nightclub called the Independent on Divisidero in San Francisco.

We have the Fox Theater in Oakland, the Greek Theater in Berkeley, the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and we also have a music festival called Outside Lands that takes place in August at Golden Gate Park. We, within the past three weeks, opened up a venue called the Castro Theater. We reopened the Castro theater after a $40 million renovation.

And it's just amazing to see how much that has infused energy into our merchant corridor and how the whole neighborhood is really rising with the success of the Castro Theater. I wanted to take a moment and talk about Outside Lands.

And when we looked at doing an event, a ticketed event at Golden Gate park, it hadn't happened very often before 2008, when we started the festival, there had been some notable, you know, in the 10 years prior to that, there had been two or three events that had occurred.

And we really believe that Golden Gate park is the most beautiful park in all of the land, and we want to celebrate it as much as possible.

Since we started the festival, we've had almost half a billion people come through and the majority of our ticket buyers, over 60% of our ticket buyers come from beyond a 50 mile radius, which means that they're more likely to spend the night in a hotel, make a day of it, come into town and go out to lunch, go shopping, and then come see a show.

So it was really a partnership with the city. When we looked at when to have Outside Lands, for instance, we went to SF Travel and said, when's the drippiest month of the year? Well, August is pretty slow. We don't have a lot of conferences coming in, so we chose a weekend in August.

So not only are we supporting the city when it's a little slow, but we're also making sure that our patrons and our artists have hotel rooms that are reasonably priced, because if they're going up against Salesforce or a larger citywide convention, that inventory wouldn't be there.

Last year, we were very grateful to partner with Dead Co. And we produced the 60th anniversary Grateful Dead concerts, which were really lovely and a true citywide celebration. That week, that month of August at Golden Gate park. We did three weekends of events. We had Dead and Company and then our Outside Lands Festival for three days.

And then Zach Bryan. We brought over 415,000 people into San Francisco those three weekends. So in a period of, you know, 12 to 14 days, we had 400,000 people coming into what's arguably a residential area. And it's that partnership with the city that allowed us to do this in a manner that was safe and didn't.

Of course, there was an impact to the local, the folks that live right in the neighborhood, but we really tried to minimize that.

But we worked very closely with the fire Department and the Police Department, the Entertainment Commission, REC and Park, DPW, SFMTA, Muni, all of the city agencies have a big role in planning this event and supporting it so that it goes off without a hitch. And I'm very proud of that relationship.

As I mentioned, we started outside lands in 2008, in 201810 years after the festival started, we got a tax bill for. This is really beyond my level of expertise.

I went to our tax attorney to get a little write up about it, but there's possessory interest tax that is a state tax that can be levied by a county when public lands are used.

And we got a tax Bill 10 years after we started the festival that said, zero, hey, you owe us almost $100,000 from 10 years ago and we're still arguing this. And it doubled down. Then there was this sort of recalibration where the tax assessor went back and said, well, no, no, no, we thought you owed us $100,000.

We're really tripling it and now you owe us a lot more money. It's a challenge on many levels, but given that we, we didn't have this information in advance, it wasn't part of the negotiation. When we're trying to determine what's the rent going to be for the space that we're using?

What is our ticket price going to be? How much is our concessions? How much are we charging the local restaurants that we bring in to be a partner here? We didn't have this information. It kind of caught us off guard and it's something that we're still grappling with.

So I definitely coming here to ask your help to look into that. And I think it sort of goes to show that you really need the state, the city, the county to come together all of these large events that happen throughout the region through the Bay Area, Southern California. I love going to Indio, California.

And it says welcome to city of festivals. Like, how great is that? San Francisco and California are really leading the way on public Assembly. And I'm proud of that. And I think that we're doing a great job. And this is. It's not just people that are going out and, you know, enjoying this nightlife and entertainment.

These are also the stagehands and the bartenders and the bar backs and the production assistants and. And the local up and coming artists that are booked to perform. When we opened up the Castro Theater two weeks ago, the first artist to perform on our stage was a young lady who grew up three blocks away from the theater.

Her name is Isabel Dumas and she was booked to be the opening act. And I just love that we were so hyper local with that booking and really wrapping a bow around the neighborhood and saying how proud we are to be there. So again, thank you for allowing me to be here and.

Look forward to the rest of the conversation.

Thank you. You see, like each. Each of those venues that you named and outside lands, all of our faces are lighting up because we have memories that you know and just incredible life experiences that you are also providing for folks.

And it's critical that we remember how important all this is that even goes beyond again, the dollars and cents in terms of the value of these experiences. I'm gonna turn it over to Amelia, who is the Director of Government affairs and Public Policy for California Travel Association.

Thank you, Chair. Good morning, Chair and Members. As the Chair said, my name is Emellia Zamani. I'm the Director of Government Affairs and Public Policy for the California Travel Association. We call ourselves Cal Travel. We're the statewide advocacy group for California's travel and tourism industry.

Our Members include destinations, hotels, attractions, airlines, other transportation providers, and restaurants across the state. We work closely with, but are distinct from Visit California, who markets our state globally, Cal Travel. On the other hand, we work with all of you and the Administration to ensure a policy environment that allows our industry to thrive.

As this room knows, travel and tourism aren't just amenities. They're a major economic engine for California. We're still waiting on 2025 numbers, but in 2024, Travelers infused over $156 billion into our economy. Our industry supports 1.2 million jobs and generates $12.6 billion in state and local tax revenue. Our post pandemic recovery didn't happen by accident.

Covid decimated us. I would say it cut everything, all those numbers in half. But we've slowly made progress over the years because of all the good work that Visit California has done to promote us as a welcoming and aspirational destination. But of course, we have been facing headwinds since January 2025.

I don't have to tell you what happened then. National policy decisions and global uncertainty are impacting international travel even to California. According to the U.S. travel association, the prolonged government shutdown this fall cost our industry $6.1 billion. The current partial shutdown is costing an estimated $1 billion a week in travel related economic activity.

Two proposed policies, the visa integrity fee and social media disclosures for travelers arriving through the visa Waiver program are projected to deter millions of international visitors annually and threaten to reduce spending by more than $18 billion as a result of the policies.

This comes as international travel to the US Declined last year for the first time since the pandemic. Alongside $120 billion reversal in travel spending over the last decade, California is working hard to differentiate ourselves as welcoming and globally minded.

I'm sure you've seen Visit California's work on that, especially targeted to Canada, where we're seeing the numbers drop drastically, projected to fall 18.4% due to the negative sentiment toward our Administration. So this is all happening at a very pivotal moment when we're planning on hosting the world at multiple major global events.

So when we talk about global competitiveness and major events, we have to include the nightlife economy. It's not just peripheral to tourism, it's central to it. Visitors, especially international travelers and convention attendees, expect vibrant, safe, well regulated spaces to gather after games, conferences and performances.

Restaurants, live music venues and the like are part of the full visitor experience. You've already heard this, but they encourage longer longer stays, increase per visitor spending, support small and minority owned businesses and create jobs for hospitality workers while activating our downtown corridors in the evening hours.

A downtown that goes dark at six is not competitive in today's global market. Even before the pandemic, California cities were at a competitive disadvantage compared to compared to destinations like Vegas, New Orleans and New York City.

We've talked about this on the panel, but these cities allow alcohol service beyond 2am which is particularly appealing to international visitors and major event organizers. If we want to continue attracting global sporting events, conventions and international tourism, we have to examine whether our policies align with global expectations.

This is why we've supported your policies in the past to create a limited 4:00am alcohol service license to provide safe, regulated spaces for visitors to gather. It's also why we supported Senator Wiener's entertainment zones Bill, which San Francisco so eloquently shared their successes and is hoping to replicate it throughout the state. These policies aren't about excess.

They're about structure, regulation and economic activation. With the world's eyes on California in the coming years, safety is so crucial. A well regulated nightlife economy enhances safety. It brings activity, lighting, staffing and security into downtown corridors. It creates designated spaces rather than pushing activity into unregulated environments. Downtown recovery and tourism recovery are deeply interconnected.

A strong nightlife economy supports jobs and will help us continue to attract global events, retain international visitors and ensure that we remain the premier travel destination in the US at this pivotal moment, we have an opportunity to align our policies with our ambitions.

Visit California is really talking about how we don't just want people to come for the World Cup for the LA28.

We want them to come here or see their friends and family coming here and then aspire to come again and again and again, which is why we have to have such a safe, vibrant environment right now so that we can continue to inspire those visitations in the future.

Thank you so much. Nicholas Johnson, Director of Public Policy at

Lyft Good morning Good morning Chair Haney and Committee Members. My name is Nicholas Johnson. I'm Director of Public Policy for Lyft. I appreciate you taking the time to explore strategies to revitalize and recover our downtowns and cities as California prepares to host global events.

Like we said before, in the coming months and years the state will will benefit greatly from smart public policy that successfully balances the nightlife economy, small business interests and public safety.

I'd like to focus on a few points briefly on the role Lyft plays in supporting safe, regulated nightlife and late night economies and how Lyft operates during large festivals, concerts or major sporting events.

It should be noted and Assemblymember Kalra kind of stole my point before I said it that late night rest rides serve workers, not just the nightlife. And 9% of Lyft rides happen late at night. And it would be a mistake to assume that these are all party goers and bar goers.

A significant share of these are essential workers, nurses, service industry employees, call center staff, and retail workers working swing shifts who need affordable, reliable transportation when buses and trains are not running. 42% of our riders use Lyft precisely because public transit is unavailable to them.

For those rioters, Lyft is not just a convenience, it can be a necessity. And also, rideshare has had a sustained impact in reducing DUIs, and the data to that is pretty clear.

Research from the National District Attorneys association shows that DUI charges drop in communities after rideshare services had launched, a finding consistent with studies across Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Diego and San Francisco.

And our own research shows that 61% of Lyft riders use the app specifically when they plan to drink or use a substance that would impair their driving ability. In California's major cities, that number is even higher, 73% in San Diego, 69% in San Francisco and 63% in Los Angeles.

As this Legislature considers bills that would expand nightlife hours and activity in our cities, that context definitely matters. Expanding the nightlife economy and keeping roads safe should not be competing goals if reliable transportation is part of the equation.

But Lyft is not only built for the day to day nightlife economy, we are also built for the large scale events that are coming pretty soon to our state.

And Lyft has a dedicated airports, venues and events team that works directly with city governments, transportation departments, and the venue operators and sports leagues if, if it's the super bowl for the NFL and FIFA for the World Cup.

To manage these high demand moments for the 2026 World Cup, we're already engaged with the host committees across the country on rideshare infrastructure and operational planning. Our approach includes designated pickup and drop off zones with inept navigation to reduce pedestrian bottlenecks.

But I can assure you, of course, there are, you know, sometimes those things don't work the way they should, but we always work with these cities and we've always worked with these organizations to try to make them work as efficiently as possible.

And just because we have a Super bowl in Santa Clara this year doesn't mean that we're not going to try to improve it when it comes next time. Because there's always, you know, transportation options that can improve and traffic management that can improve. And we also share anonymized rideshare data to support city transportation planning.

So we work with these transportation departments and city governments to show where the rides are being held, when they are being held, and so forth. So we've done this at a scale across the country and especially in California, and we're ready to do that more. So the economic case is straightforward.

When people can get downtown safely and easily, they spend money there. Lyft brings riders into city centers and neighborhoods to shop, dine and support local businesses and provide earnings for drivers who make those trips possible. Connectivity is an essential concern for downtown recovery.

Reliable ride share access is a core component of any nightlife expansion or major events policy. And Lyft would be happy to be a resource and collaborate on a policy that takes shape. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for that perspective and also just your continued commitment to supporting the broader transportation needs of folks who are attending these events and participating in the nightlife economy. I'm going to throw out two questions and then I'll open it up to Assembly Member Kalra as well.

One is, and this is maybe first for these are sort of related things, but I think mostly for Mary, one is, you know, we've heard a lot about how independent venues are struggling and few are able to be profitable and the sort of the minority are profitable currently.

I wonder if you could speak to how you all have approached this question, particularly for the venues that you operate.

I mean, the investment in the Castro theater and I mean just the way that you are doing it and supporting these, you know, just essential community institutions and doing it successfully, I think is of Interest in particularly an issue that I've started to work a lot more around, the ticketing and the secondary ticketing market and how we make sure that, you know, the money that's spent in the venues go to the artists and to the people who work there and the people who are making the investments in the venues.

And then also, just a little side question here about at Outside Lands, one of the things that has been interesting is sort of the way that you are bringing some of the cannabis opportunities there and sort of on both of those questions, if there's anything that you might flag for us as a state policy question, and if there are other folks who want to comment on either of those things as well.

Well, I'm very grateful that you're looking at secondary ticket sales, because it may not seem like the right way to approach it, but we believe that if we keep our ticket price low and keep our drink prices as low as they can be and encourage people to come out more than just the once, you know, once a year special occasion, that it promotes our business and that we're a healthier model with that.

And it's really, it's heartbreaking when you're at a show and especially something like Cat's Eye or Olivia Rodrigo that has a really young audience and moms and dads are scraping their bank account and investing in these tickets that they're buying through StubHub or Vivid Seats that aren't even real tickets, and they come to the front door and you have to tell your kids, I'm sorry, we were duped on the Internet and we bought something that isn't real and you can't let people into the venue like that.

Just, that's really a crummy place to be. So I'm very grateful that you're looking at secondary ticket marketing and how they do business. I actually personally pulled the first permit number 01 from the office of Cannabis in San Francisco. And it's the most relaxed place in all of Outside Lands, like our grasslands.

At first, people, Public safety was really worried, like, wow, we're going to have medical issues. People are going to get into fights. What are we going to do? I'm like, it's very chill up there, uniquely relaxed. And it's the one part of our festival that is not doing well financially.

Cannabis is so heavily taxed that despite the fact that we're trying to support local cannabis equity permit holders and we're again trying to keep our price is low and the price to be at the festival, we're trying to keep reasonable.

The cannabis brands that we're engaging with are having a tough time financially making it all pencil out financially. So I would love to see cannabis cafes. I'd love to see where you could go to a comedy show. And there's a little cannabis activation in the back. I feel like cannabis doesn't have to be the boogeyman.

It doesn't have to be something scary or over regulated. It's just an adult part of recreation.

Either. I'll just tee up one other question in terms of when you're looking at what convention centers are dealing with in terms of competing with other cities and countries, when you're looking at what is bringing visitors here. And again we we're going to hear some from some folks from overseas in the next panel.

But the role that nightlife plays and the overall nightlife, economy and culture plays in attracting these larger conventions or also just visitors in General. What are you seeing with that? I mean, is it and how does California compete?

And is it something that comes up a lot in your conversations with your stakeholders and their efforts to really attract folks to California?

Sure. Thank you for the question. I would say the prevailing issue when it comes to comparing destinations for hosting an event of any kind is cost. And unfortunately, as you know, we treat our laborers really well here. But it does mean that it costs a lot more money.

So sometimes we see events choosing to go to places like Ohio, which don't seem to have the appeal Right. That San Diego does. But San Diego is so expensive generally.

So even though you have a beautiful location where the beach is right there and a vibrant downtown with gas lamp, oftentimes event planners choose to go elsewhere because of the cost. I know that Comic Con was in danger of relocating because they weren't getting the room rates that they were looking for.

And I think they've since recommitted to sticking around. And it's a San Diego grown convention. I know that Mike Testa with Visit Sacramento has testified in different informational hearings about the cost of doing business and how they really need investment from the state and local government to help them keep again, homegrown events from staying here.

Golden sky, for example, was a popular country music festival in Sacramento that isn't happening right now because it's so expensive. It hasn't gone anywhere else yet, but it could. And then you have, oh my gosh, I'm not a heavy metal music person, but there's the shoot, what's it called in Sacramento.

But it doesn't have any tie to Sacramento. So it's doing well right now, but it could pick up and decide to go somewhere else. I would have to get back to you on exactly how nightlife might play into some of those decisions that event planners take into consideration when they're choosing where to go.

But it is really the cost of doing business in California.

And I think that when we know that we're going to cost a little bit more, it means we also have to offer something, something more. And yeah, so they're looking at the, you know, the restaurants and the culture.

I mean, that's when we, when we compare ourselves, you know, no offense to a Las Vegas Strip kind of experience. What we're offering in many of our cities here is something that is more authentic, that is about a real experience of community and culture and identity and, and the beauty of it.

And that's what folks want to come experience. And so in order to have that, you have to have restaurants open and bars open and, and, and, and, and hotels and, and all of that that, that are available to, to, to compete, particularly when you have the higher level cost.

Definitely. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think you're referring to Aftershock. Yes. oh my gosh, thank you. Yes. And I, and by the way, I just this morning bought tickets to a festival in San Diego that if it were in Ohio, I wouldn't have bought those tickets.

But your point is very, especially for those traveling to California, all the expenses do add up in addition to the cost of tickets. Appreciate all your presentations.

And there's no doubt that events like outside lands and venues and even we just saw the Super Bowl, San Francisco and San Jose and all parts in between had all these outdoor concerts and DJs and festivals.

Probably every entertainment venue in the Bay Area was booked up, but with just different entertainment across the spectrum of musical taste and interests. And it was great to see that. But again with the super bowl here, that's kind of a one off. How do we kind of keep that activity to some extent active throughout the year?

And I appreciate the services that Lyft offers in terms of. You're correct. In terms of when folks are doing that, they call it the last mile, but could be the last several miles.

In many cases when folks are getting off BART or Caltrain or light rail and it's late at night and they want to get home safely, you know, we have to have all options on the table.

And I do appreciate some of the safety measures in recent years that Lyft has put in to be able to check in with folks and Even the lift itself checks in whether with riders. And so I think that's again, that's part of if we're going to have a late night economy, it has to be safe.

And so I think in every aspect of it and I think we do have a very safe nightlife economy right now. And but that has to be a given if we're going to extend ours. A given like that. It has to maintain, have more festivals and more activities that there has to be safety.

And so going to that point that Ms. Simani mentioned about kind of concerns from the international market which are very real, you know, with FIFA coming and tickets sales are underwhelming and quite understandably, I mean we have citizens that are being stopped and detained and everyone in the world is seeing that.

Not to mention what's happening in the Middle East now but happened with Mexico. I mean there's all these different factors that we as Californians are welcoming. We're globally minded. I think the world sees that we don't control the airports and the visas and we have limited control over what really is concerning people.

It's not wanting to come to California with that in mind. I think that we would be irresponsible if. If we didn't look at how we can also attract more of a domestic market.

Definitely.

And get more folks here just because I don't at least in the near term see that international market sensibility changing much. We're still going to get some travelers, but not as much as we get under ordinary circumstances even with these major events.

And so any thoughts about how we can do that given the fact it is more expensive, but we have a lot to offer.

Are there things from a kind of the tourist agencies at the local like municipal organizations or regional or even statewide we can do to help ease the burden of folks coming from other parts of the country?

Sure. Thank you. That's really what Visit California shines at. Coming out of the pandemic, we really pivoted. They. Sorry. We work very close together but they are they and I am me. Visit California really pivoted to domestic marketing.

They wanted to get folks from Florida to come here or people in the middle to choose us over Florida and they really excel at that. They did that coming out of 911 as well when people were terrified to travel.

They also have co op programs so they'll partner with San Francisco Travel, visit Sacramento, visit San Jose to promote the local marketing and kind of give it an extra oomph where the the dollars might not be there for the local Destination marketing organizations Visit California can co brand with them and push out.

So they're really, they're working on that. I mentioned this in my remarks, but they had a lot of marketing around. Their new thing is we're the ultimate playground. So that, that goes to anyone that's applicable to anyone from international to domestic. Bring your kids. They have Kidifornia I think is one of their marketing programs.

Kids really driving the decision making when it comes to their family vacations and highlighting all our great attractions, both theme park and natural resources. So I think it really on Visit California and their marketing, they're excellent at it. They're really great at pushing out the messaging.

And when we hosted when the Super Bowl a few years ago, they had a really exciting super bowl ad showing all the amazing things that California has to offer. So I think that's really the best way of getting the message out that the rest of the nation should choose California.

Do we know if it's working?

It is working and they can give you better. I can follow up with numbers. I'm not the marketing person.

You can have them follow up. I just want to. We're doing it. I want to see kind of like if they're. Exactly. Yes.

I again just want to thank all three of you for being here for your partnership. And I think also what we're hearing here is that sometimes we focus on the very narrow. You know, can this one venue have a certain amount of hours? Can it?

But really this is an ecosystem that is all connected that when one part of it suffers, in this case our nightlife sector in particular has, has, has really struggled. It has a lot of ripple effects on so many other things.

Whether the convention centers are able to attract folks here, whether our hotels are full, whether our restaurants are, are thriving, whether there's foot traffic which supports overall safety. There's so many ripple effects at, at for different sectors, but also for different times of the day. You know, you're.

You might not go out to dinner in a city if you don't have a place to go after that, where there's a theater that's thriving. And if you do have a big festival or a big venue that is bringing folks in, so many others benefit from that. It's also leading.

What we're hearing is folks now have a choice in many cases as to whether you come into work in the office. They could work remote now they want to come into the office because they know they can go see a concert afterwards and they have transportation opportunities to get home.

And similar as we're attracting folks to build housing and live in our cities and downtown. So a lot of it has to do with the opportunities that exist in community and culture and identity, which is what really run our cities, but also what makes California special.

And so that's as we try to deal with some of the cost issues, we have to make sure that we also are protecting what is so special about California as a destination. And, and that's really our culture, our creativity, our innovation, our beauty. And that requires music and arts and also ways for people to get there safely.

So thank you to all three of you and look forward to the continued partnership.

All right, we are going to bring up, bring in our last panel and all three are going to be remote and we wanted to make sure to start as soon as possible on time for them because they are all joining us from around the country and around the world.

And we're very excited to hear about the experience of other jurisdictions and what California can learn, what our cities can learn. So I am going to start with Sam Mathys, who is the senior policy officer for the Greater London Authority. We have Sam there.

Yes, hello, can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

Okay, great, thanks. Thank you so much. Chair and Assembly Members, we're so happy to be here today. I'm actually also joined by my colleague Julieta, who I will introduce and she'll take us through a bit of the how we've got here so far and the history behind the London nightlife office.

Thank you, Sam, and thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. I am the policy and research lead for the 24 hour London team.

And the reason why Sam and I are doing a double act is because when we work together too much and now we're becoming one person, but also because I've been here for almost five years and this office that we are in, the 24 hour London office, it's this year turning 10 years old.

So we've been on a really long journey to get to where we are now, which is we are very proud of it. It's an amazing place to be and Sam will be talking about that. But it took a lot of work.

So I'm going to be very brief, but I'm going to give you an overview of where we started. Basically when the mayor assumed his first term, he's now in the third one in the year 2016, he decided to take Knight and make it a priority policy area. Why? Because of two reasons.

One is because the international President, including my colleague Ben, who was here earlier. The amazing work they were already doing. London didn't want to be left behind. On the other hand, venues, particularly LGBTQ venues, were shutting down at an alarming rate. So something had to be done. So the mayor took this and he ran with it.

He published, first of all, a vision for London as a 24 hour city. So not just a night city, a 24 hour city. He also appointed a night czar, the first one ever in London, the Uk, and one of the first ones in the world.

He also set up a London at Night commission, which, as you will see in two minutes, was the first commission that we ever had. And he asked them to kind of work together and come up with a plan and recommendations to make the vision come true.

And the first thing the commission did was, we have no data, we have nowhere to look at, we don't know what we're kind of like managing and measuring. So he also commissioned the first ever evidence base for a 24 hour city.

Now, cities all around the world are measuring different things in different times, but they're looking into data for the night, as we heard from Professor Figman earlier. But at the time, that was the first one. So the commission went out to work for almost two years, and in 2019, they published a report with these 10 recommendations.

Now, all of these set the basis for what in London we call a holistic approach to the night. And what that means is that A, we consider the night, everything that happens from 6:00pm to 6:00am and B, that we understand nightlife as an ecosystem within a bigger ecosystem, which is the ecosystem of the night.

It doesn't exist in isolation. And we do need infrastructure in the city to work for those that need to go to work and come back, those that are out and about because they want to party, because they have to, or because they just choose to. So following the time recommendations, delivery action started.

And this was in 2019, you may all remember 2020, things happened or didn't happen. So after the pandemic, what happened is that it became really clear how important nightlife and nighttime activities were for revitalizing cities, town centers, local areas. So in London, we have 33 different local authorities that make up the city.

The mayor asked each one of them to develop their own local nighttime strategy. He also supported them in running pilots, extending opening hours, seeing how could we make the night more diverse. What people were saying earlier about including families, people that don't drink, people that don't normally go out at night.

So all of these things were on trial at the same time, the night the tube was extended to work 24 hours on Fridays and Saturdays. We are now trying to extend it to more days in the week, but more on that later.

We also set up a women's night safety charter to ensure women and girls going out at night felt safe and people like venues were protecting them and how we help venues protect the people that are vulnerable at night, and so on and so forth. However, after the pandemic, something else happened.

Nightlife was the first thing to shut down in lockdown and the last one to open. So from 2021-22 as we started to come out to this day, Night Live started to be faced with many, many challenges that I'm sure all year, like no change of habits post pandemic.

Young people or people in General not drinking as much, not going out as much, cost of doing businesses, cost of life, therefore people having less money to spend, so on and so forth.

So we reached a point where something had to be done to address this issue in the same way that back in 2016, the thing that needed to be addressed was shutting out the venues.

The night czar stepped down in October 2024, and the mayor decided that instead of appointing a new night czar, we were going to reconsider the remit of the role, the remit of the office and what was happening. So instead of appointing a new nightsar, he called a commission again, this time very much laser focused on nightlife.

So we have the London at Nightlife Commission, which Sam is going to be talking about because she was working straight directly with them. Thank you.

Thank you, Julieta. Yes. So we convened this task force and it was a research project that lasted a year in total. We looked at all kinds of data and I think it's actually the most comprehensive data set we've ever had on nightlife in the capital.

So the task force, so there was two parts, there was the research, but there was also another key set of recommendations. And I think what I want to touch on here is that no single policy measure can, can really affect change in this system.

We needed really an ecosystem of measures and we kind of spread those, spread those out across 10 different areas, essentially with 20 recommendations for the mayor. So I'll try and give you the highlights of our research. It's a 50 page report, so bear with me.

So I'll try and summariz best I can, but I'm happy to share any insights afterwards as well. So I think one of the main things for us was for all institutions to recognize nightlife as key cultural, social and economic infrastructure.

And that entailed actually putting in place a definition for nightlife, which was the first time we've ever had a shared definition. And the definition we came up with was all events, activities and spaces that encourage social or cultural participation between 6pm and 6am that gave us the real scope for the project.

Then we were able to map actually the value of our nighttime economy and our nightlife economy. So we valued the nighttime economy in London at 139 billion in 2024 and 21 billion specifically for the nightlife economy subset. Sort of another huge takeaway for us is that nightlife isn't disappearing, but it's changing in London.

So the previous demand has definitely shifted. We are seeing a complete rise in the multidisciplinary venue. Venues are no longer doing one thing to survive. They might be a music venue on a Thursday, a club night on a Friday and Saturday, and they could even be a community center from Monday to Wednesday.

They're really sort of going across the spectrum and really reaching out to different communities as part of their offer. And I think that brings me to my point around flexibility, which I think Michael mentioned earlier, which is key essentially moving forward to make sure we can experience growth in the nightlife economy.

I think there's also a larger appetite for experiences in nightlife. So you know, we all know young people aren't drinking as much. I think in our research in London it was 40% of nightlife of young people who are not drinking in nightlife spaces.

So we need to sort of gear our regulation differently, I think, and have different sort of conversations around that. Outdoor activations are also been a huge economic booster for us. So for example, putting in a night market in a, in a Pedestrianized street until 9pm that market then closes. There's spillover into the local businesses.

That has been extremely successful model for us. We're also trying to mimic a bit more from our European cousins around outdoor dining and relaxed regulation to improve that. Diversification has been really key in our findings. So any sort of diverse offer really reinforces safety actually and resilience of our local high streets.

So a really healthy mix of like food led spaces, live music, arts and performance, for example, alcohol free options, definitely later cafes, you know, events and also like family accessible programming. Our next sort of bit around the research was around crime and antisocial behavior.

Our research actually showed that smart regulation can actually play a key part in reducing crime and antisocial behavior. One of our busiest nightlife, Burrows Hackney, where I Previously ran a series of nightlife initiatives, saw increased late night activity.

So we increased late night provision to 4am or 5am licenses and saw decreases in crime actually, which was really encouraging to see. Also we found that nightlife helps with workforce retention in a city.

So a key part of our research showed that almost half of people who decided to move to London stayed in London because of the nightlife offer. And that rose to 73% in the tech industries. We also found that vacancy kills confidence in our downtown.

So we're rolling out a huge program around meanwhile use and how to activate empty retail units, for example, and try and get nightlife concepts into those units. And that's all part of our strategy to kind of foster a bit more vibrant, inclusive and diversive nightlife offer.

The last bit around regulation is a lot around the cost of doing business and trying to kind of streamline processes for businesses. Previously we had 33 different licensing policies in London, which was really hard to navigate for those businesses who are trying to set up shop in multiple boroughs.

We have now just acquired new powers for the mayor that will be coming in this year to provide a strategic licensing policy for London which will help local boroughs form their local policies. And that's something we're really looking forward to and really happy to share some learnings on.

So I think, you know, I'm trying to do a very quick stop tour in our research. But to summarize, essentially, I think the governance and the nightlife office was really key and seeing us reduce the amount of venues closures after the pandemic.

I think using data to really drive reform has been really something that we're really proud of in London.

Favoring flexibility and I think, you know, things like 24 hour activity, a really balanced sort of staggering of closing times in local areas, diversification, local crime partnerships have also been really helpful to kind of combat local issues and then the meanwhile space. So those are kind of my highlights, but I'm happy to sort of take questions.

That is great stuff. And some of the data that you shared as well. Definitely having that in that kind of concrete way is super helpful for us as we're making the case for how important this is. So I'm going to move to our next panelist and then we'll hold questions for you all for the end.

So the next person we have with us is Ariel Palitz, the founding and former Director of the New York City Mayor's Office of Nightlife. Wow. We have London and New York here and Philadelphia, three places that we're very lucky to learn from and be able to collaborate with Ariel. Are you on it?

Is ariel there? Should I go to Brian?

Yes. Oh, she is here. I think we're having trouble switching.

No, we can't hear you, Ariel.

We can see you, but we can't hear you. Yeah,

Okay.

All right. Why don't we have Raheem, if you're ready, you want to jump in, and then we'll. Yes. Can. Can everyone hear me? Yes, we can hear you fine.

All right. Well, good afternoon from the East Coast. I think it's still morning or whatever time it is on the West Coast, but I'm Raheem Manning. I serve as the Senior Director for the Nighttime Economy in the city of Philadelphia. I am the first to hold this role.

As you heard from my many colleagues, you know, from London. You'll hear from my colleagues from New York, as well as my colleague Ben in San Francisco, as well as Mike Fitchman, who helped found my role. Philadelphia came on about almost four years ago into nighttime governance. And we took a particular focused approach at this.

When you, you'll learn about a lot of different nighttime governance offices and where they are placed. Ours particularly is in economic development. And that's kind of where I want to steer my testimony today. All everything my colleagues say, said and will say, I echo and agree with.

We're all a close knit group of people when it comes to advocating for cities to understand what it is to be 24 hour global destination. Right.

And so one of the things we do in Philadelphia is that we have within our Department of Commerce a business development team that focuses on the attraction and retention of key industries and businesses in our cities. Those key industries that I fall under are keen to like life sciences, tech, advanced manufacturing, international, international business, attraction.

And we put nighttime economy in that same bucket because what we have to realize is that it's more than just having fun, the social economy, but it's a driver of economic, the economic engine for cities and states around the world.

And as we shift to a more global society, you have to realize that California as a state on the West Coast of the US Is not just competing with Nevada and Vegas and Washington and Oregon to the north of them.

They're competing with New York, they're competing with Philadelphia, they're competing with London and Amsterdam and Berlin and all these cities around the world. And competition isn't a bad thing. When we're competing, we all.

And so when we look at our nighttime economy here in the city of Philadelphia, we're looking at it as an industry to invest in, to attract and retain more businesses, but also to provide a Higher quality of life to attract and retain more residents, workers and people who want to come and tour and visit the city of Philadelphia.

To talk a little bit about the numbers, we did our economic impact study to look at our nighttime economy as a whole. And Philadelphia boasts a 26.2 billion dollar per year economic engine that we call the nighttime economy.

And that's going to be all activity that focuses from 6pm to 6am I think another stigma that we in our roles here often have to back down is that when we say nighttime economy, people always jump to nightlife. It's a big part of what the nighttime economy is and it's a big attractive part. Right.

It's where a lot of people choose where they're going to vacation and where they're going to live and work. But I want to break down what our $26.2 billion nighttime economy looks like.

And I'm pretty sure a lot of my colleagues could say similar buckets Right out of that $26.2 billion, 13% of all jobs in the city of Philadelphia in the nighttime economy, about 132,000 employees. Let me break down the industries that make up that $32.2 billion. Night Shift Industries.

This are night shift activities that keep cities economic gears turning 247 beyond the scenes. Manufacturing, logistics sectors work tirelessly to keep the city's heartbeat around the clock. So these are the essential services that cities would not survive without. That makes up 40% of Philadelphia's nighttime economy.

Next are those essential services that keep the city running through the night, but also seamless. Access to health care, transportation, public safety and utilities. Right. So these are the things that are going to affect the quality of life and health of our citizens. That's 33% of our nighttime economy.

Food, beverage and hospitality, the one that gets a lot of attention. Of course we know how important that is. It's 14% of our nighttime economy. Sports and recreation is 9%. Arts and culture is 5% of our nighttime economy. And I say that not to belittle the impact of arts, culture, nightlife and sports. We know that's very important.

But it's to paint the bigger picture that investing in your nighttime economy, it's not just about making your city, your state more fun, but it's about making it more competitive, more safe and a bigger economic engine and driver.

As cities and states continue to diversify from from office use to downtown to other ways to bring in revenue and tax dollars and attract business and talent around the world. You have to look at this as an economic engine and how we could provide for it. Let's talk quality of life, right?

We also talked about nightlife and going out from the consumer point of view. But let's talk about it from the worker point of view. All of us here are working during the day. You guys are doing your job, listening and hearing, hopefully taking some great notes to make some great changes to invest in your nighttime economy.

I know our friends over across the pond, it's a little later, but let's just say we all wanted to take a break from this hearing right now and want to go get lunch. Everyone here could go get a specific lunch that fits their dietary need.

They could use their lunch break to go run to the bank to handle business. They could run to the city hall to talk about their tax Bill or their water Bill.

And if they're a business owner, we can all go and do those quality of life things that make it easier for us to manage families, to manage our own mental and, you know, health safety. We can do those things, right?

But if we were working at 2am and we just got off, everybody assumes if you work at a restaurant, you eat when you get off and most of the times you're working, you didn't. Where can I go at 2am and get a quality meal that meets my dietary and health needs and restrictions?

If I needed medicine at 2am and I couldn't get it because I was working during the day, working, sleeping during the day and working during the night, where can I go fill those prescriptions?

If I have a family at home and kids I need to send off to school, how can I go and make sure that I have groceries so that I can make breakfast to send my kids off to school and then I can rest and start my day again?

Nighttime economy, investment and policy is not just about going out and having fun. It's about the quality of life we provide for our citizens that live in our city. Additionally, when you look at it, it's about again, business infrastructure and attraction.

You know, my London colleagues talked about it very, you know, briefly, Sam, Love the way you stated it, where the ease of doing business. Nighttime businesses are some of the most overly regulated businesses in most cities economies. The they're permitted through the wazoo, right?

There's so many different permitting and if you sell alcohol, there's so many different restrictions on that. Additionally, when you talk about the economic impact, and I remember one of the Assembly Members saying it earlier, nighttime businesses pay rent 24 hours just like us. They pay mortgage 24 hours just like us.

But they are only regulated to six or maybe four hours to make money, to make ends meet. So as you talk about the extension of hours, it's not about partying or drinking later. It's about allowing people to feed their family and to have viable businesses that bring in tax revenue into our cities.

Out of that $26.2 billion that Philadelphia's nighttime economy economic end of this year, $9 billion of wages are paid out. In addition to that, the city brings in almost $400 million in tax and wage revenue that goes to our city coffers to help us with other things like schools and, you know, maintenance and infrastructure, care.

So again, I say that to say that we have to reshape. When we're thinking about the nighttime economy, it's not just about, you know, know those things that are nice to have.

But if you want to be a 24 hour, globally competitive hub for arts, culture, nightlife, tourism, you need to have a nighttime economy strategy and look at how and you can make policies that support those who work, who live and who want to come. And then again, I'll leave with this.

As I started with the competitiveness of cities are now at the nighttime economy. We have a part where people can work from home and work remotely from wherever they want. People are globally connected. And so it's not the traditional way where picking a job was typically about how much someone's going to pay you.

If you look at our younger generations, I'm a millennial or Gen Zs, they're picking where they're going based on where they're going to enjoy, where the quality of life is going to be great. I would also say when you look at cities as rising, costs are going.

The cities that are going to continue to diversify and keep people, because cost is some things that you control inside, a little bit of it is global. People are choosing to stay at more expensive places if the nighttime economy is provides a unique experience they can't get elsewhere.

Because why would I take my $150,000 remote job and stay in a place where cost of living is higher if I can go do it in a place that's rural, in the middle of nowhere, that doesn't have as much overhead?

But the reason for that is because of how cities put their nighttime economy strategy together, how they look at their arts, their entertainment, and the creative economy. So therefore, I choose to stay in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, although I know that I could go somewhere else with a bigger economic impact.

The difference between me staying in your state and particularly speaking to California or versus going somewhere else is going to be your nighttime economy strategy and those things that you provide for quality of life.

So I will stop there because a lot of great things were said and I didn't want to repeat all the great things that my colleague said, but I wanted to make sure that we shaped how we look at the nighttime economy.

What does it mean and how it keeps your state and your cities in your state competitive against every other one around the world that's doing this work. Thank you.

Thank you. Now those were. You're speaking our language for sure. And I appreciate the reminder that we're not just talking about bars and music venues and clubs. And there are a lot, a lot of people who are working at night.

Obviously all of us are, you know, may at some point need something at night that relates to our health, our well being, our eating services and folks who for a variety of reasons, and I think increasingly because hours are not so standardized for a lot of folks now, it may work different time zones that keep them up late at night or they may need to have certain types of access to services or public safety, other things.

So I do think that's a very important reminder. And this is about creating a quality of life that serves the needs of all of our residents and what is really a changing way of living and changing economy. Do we have Arielle able to jump on?

Can you hear me? Can you see me?

Yes, yes, we got you, hear you and see you. Welcome.

Oh my goodness, apologies. I think it's mercury retrograde. So. Yes, thank you. Good afternoon, Chair Members of the Committee, I truly appreciate the opportunity to be here. As you mentioned, I'm Ariel Palitz. I served as the founding Director of the Mayor's Office of Nightlife in New York City for five years from 2018 to 2023.

Under two mayors and throughout the pandemic. I was appointed to build a new non enforcement government office dedicated to serving as a liaison between the city's nightlife industry, residents and government agencies. The role was created to support a safe, thriving nightlife scene that benefits not only the businesses, culture and community, but the city at large.

To ensure that nightlife works for everyone and to facilitate coexistence. I'm here to briefly share how strategic and proactive attention to the nighttime economy can support 24 hour growth and recovery from the lingering issues post pandemic. Sorry. Whoops. There goes my words again.

So the nighttime economy is not just about nightlife, but life at night, as my cohorts have mentioned, it's restaurants, live performances, arts and culture, museums, hotels, shift workers, healthcare workers, transit riders. As we've mentioned the other nine to five Historically, even since the prohibitionary era, nightlife has been stigmatized, vilified, underappreciated, over regulated, overly enforced and unsupported.

For decades, cities approached life at night as a liability to control rather than an asset to cultivate. But when you reframe nightlife as a valuable infrastructure and not a nuisance, everything changes. The Nightlife Mayor and Nighttime Governance movement began in Amsterdam in 2021. Since then, it's expanded to nearly 100 cities around the world.

New York was the fifth in the United States, but there's nearly 20 now, not just in major metropolitan centers, but in places like Iowa City, Orlando, Philadelphia, San Francisco. The reason is simple. Issues around safety, quality of life, economic development, development vibrancy are universal and cities are grappling with the same tensions and opportunities.

And this global movement has allowed US Leaders to share lessons learned and practical solutions. Perhaps the most important lesson is that this dedicated, proactive attention is required to ensure that life night is growing and thriving. In 2018, when the Office of Nightlife was created, it was housed inside the Department of Small Businesses.

Even in a city of nearly 9 million residents, 20,000 liquor licensed establishments and 65 million annual visitors, this office consisted of one Executive Director and three staff Members. I mention this because this work is not about building large bureaucracy, it's about coordination. Police, fire, health, buildings, transportation, sanitation, economic development, working in concert together.

My role was to act as a conductor, aligning agencies, programs, initiatives, even funding that already existed to ensure that nightlife has a seat at the table to help solve shared challenges with mutually beneficial solutions.

When I became the founding Director, the responsibility was not just to talk about nightlife differently, but to build practical systems that worked, and I will talk you briefly through what that looked like.

We first conducted an economic impact study which demonstrated nightlife in New York city as a 35.1 had a $35.1 billion impact, supporting over 300,000 jobs, 700 million in tax revenue. To establish nightlife as a powerful economic engine, we then established a MASH approach, Multi Agency Support for hospitality.

MASH convenes all relevant city and state agencies, both enforcement and non enforcement, into regular coordinated meetings. Instead of agencies operating in silos and responding reactively to complaints, we created a forum to coordinate city services, identify patterns, streamline communication, offer compliance guidance, and intervene early before issues are escalated.

This shifted the tone from raid and punish to coordinate and correct. It acknowledged that hospitality businesses are small businesses and they need clarity, support and support, not multi agency confusion. At the time, New York also had a program called MARCH which stood for Multi Agency Response to Community Hotspots. MARCH was enforcement forward.

It focused on shutting down and penalizing establishments after complaints and incidents are accumulated. We work to dismantle that decades old model and replace it with a program called cure, which stands for Coordinating a Unified Response with Establishments. The philosophy changed.

Instead of escalating immediately to heavy enforcement, CURE brought agencies together with operators to identify issues, provide clear corrective steps, allow CURE periods, offer technical assistance to improve quality of life and safety conditions before penalties.

Again, it recognized that most operators are good operators that want to comply and that you can have greater compliance success through communication and coordination rather than a strictly punitive approach. As I mentioned earlier also, most complaints default to police response and most enforcement is complaint driven.

A chronic caller who complains about a bar next door is not just an issue for the venue, but draws on precious police resources and also escalates to to local officials and then they become the recipient of chronic collars as well. But most sound complaints are not criminal issues, they're neighbor issues. So we created a program called mend.

It stands for Mediating Establishment Neighborhood Disputes. It provides professional free mediation during daylight hours conversations at 2pm in the afternoon, not 2am in the morning. And it creates direct communication between neighbors and operators, transforming adversaries into coexisting stakeholders. We also launched a program called Narcan behind Every Bar during the height of the fentanyl crisis.

Rather than vilifying venues, we partnered with them training workers in overdose response, putting life saving medication such as Narcan into the establishment. Recognizing that nightlife workers are often first responders before first responders arrive. This is what it means to approach nightlife as public health, as a public health infrastructure, not simply entertainment, not simply through enforcement.

During the pandemic, New York implemented programs that directly supported hospitality and nighttime activation. That and many became permanent.

New York launched open restaurants as an emergency measure which what began as a crisis response evolved into a permanent infrastructure called Dining out nyc managed by the Department of Transportation, which allows restaurants to expand seating into sidewalks and into roadway space under permit. This wasn't about survival.

It extended the economic footprint into the streets and increased pedestrian activity and made downtown corridors feel alive in the evenings. Similarly, open streets temporarily close selected streets into vehicles and prioritize people. Community partners, nonprofits, business improvement districts can apply to operate them. The streets became places for walking, biking, community programming, outdoor dining and coffee cultural events.

New York's viability at night is inseparable from transportation. Contrary to popular belief, we are called the city that never sleeps, not only because of our nightlife, but because of our 24 hour transportation systems.

And speaking of 24 hours, New York has also played with the idea of introducing 24 hour entertainment districts, extending our liquor service and operating hours to be more competitive for tourism on a world stage. With cities like Miami, Las Vegas and Berlin who provide 24 hour hospitality, it's something to think about.

Because New York's Office of Nightlife existed before the pandemic, the industry had a seat at the table during crisis and recovery and continues now with its second Executive Director and has expanded the office with two more staffers.

It continues to implement programs and initiatives and work with the city Small Business first initiative to streamline inspections and reduce unnecessary fines. And therefore I do highly recommend that all cities consider implementing their own dedicated nightlife offices and directors.

We also detailed much of this in an inaugural report released in 2021 and subsequent annual reports that are all available for your review. Life at night has historically been managed through stigma and enforcement.

But New York City and many cities around the world and the country have shifted from enforcement first to problem solving first, from the reactive liability response to asset management. And with the central office and Director, through proactive coordination, mediation, regulatory modernization, transportation alignment, nightlife and life at night become a powerful tool for economic revitalization and growth.

Thank you,

Thank you. I appreciate that. And I also just appreciate the reminder that even in the city that never sleeps, there has been a stigma to some nighttime activities.

A lot of what we're doing is making sure that we are analyzing and fixing and adjusting and evolving all of our laws and policies and practices that have been anti nighttime in many ways and created huge burdens and barriers for the many, many, many people who now need to operate or access services or community or culture or food.

And of course the many, many economic, social and cultural opportunities that exist for our cities and communities and states and countries at nighttime. So, Assemblymember Kalra, do you want to start us off here?

Sure. Thank you all so much for your thoughts on this important topic and to our friends in New York and Philadelphia, I hope you're still trying to stay warm out there and hope all the storms are that the worst of it is behind you.

And you know, as Mr. Manning was talking about not trying to be too repetitive with folks, the reality is there are a lot of common themes here not just amongst the folks in this last panel, but all the panels, there was quite a lot of commonalities and one I heard a lot of was the flexibility that's necessary in order to ensure that our cities, our nightlife in our cities thrive.

Even from our friends from London even spoke to the flexibility necessary, especially post pandemic, in order to create these truly diverse and economically thriving destinations.

And I certainly think that that's why this is so important for us to have this select Committee hearing or select Committee in General is because the state oftentimes is inflexible and can get in the way of that flexibility.

And so oftentimes I think at a state level, some of what we need to do is just get out of the way. And I think that could be the same thing at the local jurisdictions to have more, greater flexibility with their conditional use permits and zoning and more creativity in these spaces.

And I really like what Ms. Palace had to say about kind of the role of this office of Nightlife and being a non enforcement government liaison to the city's nightlife industry.

I think all too often our nightlife industry, the first time they hear from a city is when they're in trouble or you're not doing this right or you need that permit, you shouldn't do this. As opposed to that first and regular contact being how can we help you?

What do we need to do to make sure your business can thrive not just today, for many years to come? How do we create districts? And that's where the work for our chair and our Senator from San Francisco as well as, and creating these entertainment zones and thinking about late night, staying open late night.

And so I just really, it's really not surprising, but important for us to see that downtowns throughout the world, in other parts of the country are facing the same kinds of issues. But they're also seems like we're coming to the same conclusions as what should be done. The question is how we do it.

And that's why it's so important for us to hear from these global destinations of how they're actually achieving. And we're seeing some of our own cities in California trying to get there as well in different ways.

I'm really interested in getting a chance if it could be shared, the report From London, that 50 page report, I would love to look more into that. I think it'll help illuminate us as we come to some of our own conclusions in our select Committee and in General, New York, Philadelphia, certainly cities throughout our state.

In this post pandemic world. Everyone's kind of talked about the younger generation not drinking as much, wanting more diversity of activities, the safety of our late night community, our workers, not just the patrons. And so I don't have any specific questions.

I'm just really grateful to get this feedback from communities around the world and our East Coast friends. I'll be out in New York later in March and early April, so I can't wait to go out there and see some of the things that are happening in New York and what we can bring back here to California.

So thank you.

Thank you, Assemblymember Colran. I echo the appreciation and the desire to look at the incredible research and comprehensive work that all of you have done. And I I'm sure some of you, Mercalla agrees that the three of you represent three of our favorite cities outside of California.

Just extraordinarily diverse and vibrant and obviously a huge part of it is because of the work that you all are doing.

I did want to take the opportunity because this has been top of mind for us here and we know that there are so many different aspects of of what needs to be done to support the full nightlife economy and life at night more generally.

But I did want to take the opportunity if you all might weigh in to help us because this is a policy consideration in front of us right now around how you have thought about last call and alcohol hours.

And we heard earlier that Pennsylvania is maybe considering adjusting theirs in some way and also that London has sort of thought very intentionally about this.

Obviously we know that this has long been a part of New York's nightlife culture and right now we've had some challenges in California in adjusting what is still a across the board, one size fits all. Every city, every venue cannot go later than 2am on any day with last call.

So I wonder just if each of you could help us address that and think about have us understand how you thought about it to perhaps help us with the conversation here in California.

Yeah, I can definitely address as Pennsylvania is looking at some flexibility. I think one of the Assembly Members said before then that a lot of times the state is inflexible.

So for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania we are state controlled system when it comes to alcohol and what we are seeking from the state, from the city of Philadelphia and leading the efforts there is flexibility to attract and retain right.

We are hosting the World Cup, the MLB All Star Game, America's 250th birthday, the PGA Championship as well as March Madness all within three months period here in the City of Philadelphia. And we will have the global stage here.

And we reached out to the state to say, how do we ensure that our city and our state is competitive and continue to be competitive? And some of those ways are ours. Right? The World Cup is traditionally, you know, football is again, a European, heavily managed thing in South America. They have different views on nightlife, I guess.

Additionally, those games are going to be played over four different time zones. So while the games in California will be playing and maybe ending, it may be 2am here in on the East Coast. And what does that mean for people who are coming to the city to watch?

And just, you know, the stats tell us 70% of the people that will be in your city for the World Cup will not have a ticket to the game. They will have to watch at your venues around.

And so we're reaching out to the state to see that we can put flexibility in not only for these mega events that we have here, but to continue to attract these world and global events.

Having tools about extending hours or even extension of premises, create more festive atmosphere, makes Philadelphia, in my head, in my purview in other cities more attractive when you're competing against other cities globally. And that's what we're asking for, right? Not just about people drinking and going out later.

Although again, me and my colleagues can get into the studies about how longer or not hard closing hours does ease quality of life concerns and ease the strain on city resources. But I won't go down that but about being more attractive and retaining businesses.

And also again, looking at the nighttime economy as an industry to grow and to bring in resources versus to shut down, to manage it, to overregulate.

Yeah, great. I'm happy to come in a bit. Now what I would say in terms of London essentially is, you know what, historically we did have areas where you would get like everyone shutting out at the same time, et cetera. And I think like the. We've kind of moved away from that slightly.

So what we see is now we have some areas where there's a real staggering of those closure times and that has actually improved sort of the dependency on public services. And I actually think that I have a really good case study.

We have some clubs now that are shutting around 6am and actually the strain they create is a lot less than venues who are shutting at 3am for example, because people leave more gradually. Also there's better access to morning transport when people are leaving later.

But it also means they're not like, you know, when you have a last call. Order people are kind of driven to drink irresponsibly essentially and try and get in more drinks before they shut you down. So yeah, I think for us we're really going towards more of a 24 hour model.

That's something that our licensing policy is really striving for. And also like the increase of non alcoholic spending bases open 24 hours a day. I don't know Julieta, if you have anything to add on that.

Yeah, absolutely. Because we're having this conversation now as we're reforming the licensing system which London is going to pilot for the rest of the country. About 24 hour license is not just not necessarily related to alcohol. But for example we've mentioned night workers. I think every single person that spoke here talk about night workers.

The biggest issue for night workers is it's access to healthy and affordable food at night. And because of the licensing we have in London, late night refreshment, this is not a problem in New York. Nobody in London is access to late night refreshments.

So people like places that can serve healthy and affordable food at night are now a no go because of the licensing. So just looking for that flexibility and licensing is a leveraging tool that we have for that.

And the other thing I was going to say is that in Bristol city here in the UK they have, they have got rid of that closing times, strict closing times that in London we are now starting to get rid of and they saw amazing improvement not only in terms of like access to public transport and less, but less fights on the street because people are not just all out at the same time desperate to looking for another place to go.

What somebody else was saying earlier about, actually I think it was the chair, Mr. Chair about people going to house parties and this and that, just giving that access, that possibility.

And the last thing is that just because there's More access to 24 hour licenses it doesn't mean that every single place in the city is going to be open 24 hours. It's just allowing for more flexibility. Basically. That's the spirit of it.

Yeah. And I concur with everyone. And this also sort of demonstrates a lot where like the idea of stigma and this vilification of at night and the belief that more restriction on hours and movement and sound and live music, that the more we restrict it the safer and the more quality of life there will be.

But there is evidence all around the world that shows that having less restriction, more breathing room, so there's no like spiking and drinking at the closing hour and Having everyone rushing out all at the same time really is what creates the strain and creates the quality of life and safety issues. It's really the opposite.

And so the idea of a 24 hour city really allows to what one of the other Members said, having trust, trust in the businesses, trust in your patrons, trust in your enforcement agencies to be able to self regulate and control what and when their businesses and their patrons thrive and do the most well.

And so I think again, it's a very, it's a big paradigm shift in the way one thinks about regulation and allowing breathing room and getting out of the way rather than constantly adding more and more restriction.

Mr. Chair, thank you. Thank you so much. Mr. Manning's comments just sparked a thought of agreement when he was talking about the kind of games being played. As we become international cities, there are different kinds of activities happen at different times. For example, the USA Canada Hockey Game, the Winter Olympics is at 5am here.

And our Sharks Ayes skating complex opened their doors for people to come and watch there. We have cricket matches where community centers will open at 234 in the morning for people to come together to watch.

We have football games now in Brazil, one coming in Australia, NFL game next year and people can just sit at home and watch those games. Why are they opening up doors of community centers and skating complexes and restaurants for people to come watch? It's because people inherently want to come together. These are social activities.

They don't want to sit in the living room couch, they want to go meet up with friends and watch it. And I think that's going to become, as we become more and more international as communities, that's going to be more and more common.

And so I think with the Olympics coming by the way to our friends in London, cricket hasn't been an olympic sport since 1900. It's going to be the Olympics in 2028 here in California. That's one more example of just the more folks that are going to want to interact at different times of day.

Maybe in London it's going to be in the middle of the night to watch some of those cricket matches and folks are going to want a place place to go just like we do here when we have sporting events that are happening in the middle of the night somewhere else.

And so sports has always been the type of activity to bring people together. We have to create venues that are fun, safe and bring people together where they can come and watch at midnight, leave at 5:00am And I think that's going to happen more and more and more. In years to come. So thank you.

All right. I appreciate that. And thank you for those comments and indulging us on the later Last call, a conversation. It's something that we have engaged in here in California, and we are continuing to engage in.

And I think it is just one part of this overall shift that needs to take place on how we think about nighttime activities as we are changing the way that we work and live and how interconnected we are, but also in challenging. What I think, as all of you have said, is really.

I don't know if it was ever entirely accurate, but it's certainly very, very outdated now in terms of how we talk about things that happen at nighttime. I started off the hearing saying we need to stop being afraid of the dark.

I looked up in 2018, there was a Bill that would have extended Last call in a set of cities in California. And in vetoing that Bill, our then Governor, Jerry Brown, was famously quoted as saying, I believe we have enough mischief from midnight to 2am without adding two more hours of mayhem now.

Now, I don't think that that was accurate then, but is certainly, certainly not accurate now, as folks of all different backgrounds and communities and occupations are doing a whole variety of very productive activities, creating community culture, economic activity, revenue. It is a part of their lives.

And as you all said very, very eloquently, actually, we're safer when more people are out and about. We're safer when we're together. Empty streets, dark empty streets in any of our cities does not support public safety. Having places where people can go safely, where there's not only a place to go, but. But there's accountability.

You have to have a license. The police know where you are. If you don't operate well, we can shut you down or we can take your permit. We can't do that if folks are operating outside of these regulations.

And I think part of what has allowed us to have this conversation now is because places like London and Philadelphia and San Francisco and New York and other places have such robust regulatory infrastructure now as it relates to nighttime activities so that we can both support what is happening and make sure that we keep people safe.

We have that track record now, and we have proven that it can be done well. So we just really appreciate your partnership, your leadership. We're watching, we're listening, we're reading.

And together we hope that we can challenge this really outdated and in many ways backwards and in some cases dangerous notion that we cannot support nighttime activities and do it well and do it safely. We certainly can. And Your three cities are proving it.

We hope that California can prove it as well in San Francisco and San Jose and everywhere around the state. So thank you to all four of our panelists. You all were amazing for joining us remotely and helping California try to figure this out.

And we look forward to continuing our partnership with you all and coming to visit soon, it sounds like. Thank you all. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right, I will open it up now. If there's anyone here who wants to provide any public comment. And thank you all.

We're going to actually end this panel, this Committee, right on time. So come on up.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, Mr. Kalra, thank you again for this excellent hearing. This has been a great discussion. Alex Torres with Golden Bear Strategies here in two capacities.

First, on behalf of the California Nightlife Association, Cal Knight, I really like the way you opened it about reframing how we view nightlife economy as not only a critical economic driver, but as a cultural importance, a cultural good and a tool for public safety. Again, the panelists were excellent, especially from the international perspective perspective.

There's a wide body of data that lends a lot of support to the notion of the nightlife economy as a public safety tool. So registering support for all of the initiatives that this Committee is working on in this space from Cal Knight.

Also, on behalf of Bob Simpson, who's the owner of Townie and Parkside here in Sacramento, longtime operator and someone who's really helped drive a lot of the policy here locally.

Also on behalf of the National Independent Venue association of California, representing over 300 and fifty independent brick and mortar venues, the conversation on the music and nightlife economy and the convergence of those two issues was fantastic.

And I think not only is it the cultural component, right, being able to have gathering places for community expression for artists to rise up in their careers at the small stages that become, you know, the headliners of arena shows for tomorrow.

But also about the different economics and the challenges that independent venues face right now from corporate competitors, from unchecked secondary market. So a lot of different important conversations, a lot of issues touched on today. But want to thank you, Mr. Chair, Mr. Kalra, for this important discussion. Look forward to working with the Committee Going Forward. Thank you.

Thank you, chair and assemblymember Kalra for being here. Keshav Kumar with Lighthouse Public affairs on behalf of BSC Management. This was a fantastic hearing. And one of the things that I just wanted to hone in on is that we have a clear problem and solution scenario that we've Set up here.

The problem as you touched on Chair, is that young people may be drinking less, but we still want spaces and places to go. In fact, a lot of young people, because of our work schedules, because of our school schedules, we are seeking that time for ourselves later and later into the evening.

Some of the unique tragedies that have occurred in California as a result of this include the ghost ship fire. We are in a position where we can mitigate, if not entirely solve for this problem, where people are going to unlicensed, unregulated and potentially dangerous venues to just because they need an outlet, just by extending our call time.

Solution is also very clear in a Bill that may change last call because as has been said during this panel, during all of the panels, when you alleviate the pressure, you create an opportunity not only for the patrons of nightlife, but also for the employees and also for the services that must be provided.

One thing that I would also give a plug to is cities like San Francisco have extended permit holders who have the ability to operate later into the evening. This is a tried and true program. This has registration fees. This has a regulatory scheme. What this does not have is that final component, which is entertainment.

And so with that, we have a clear way for the Legislature to provide a solution. I want to thank the chair for your leadership on trying to plug in solution to problem. I think that all of the context that we provided today is excellent.

And any way that, you know, smaller venues and operators can be of assistance, we stand ready to. And I think it's just a matter of time before the state of California sees that, you know, to compete globally and also to offer what we should be offering to our own residents. This is the best path forward.

So thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate those comments and everyone who participated in today's hearing. Also to my staff for their extraordinary assistance with this. With this hearing.

Again, we believe this is the first time this has happened where we've had an intentional conversation here about policies around nightlife, economy and the nightlife sector and as some folks put it, life at night, of which all of our residents need for us to make thoughtful, intentional public policy around.

You know, there's a few things that just I would love to close with. You know, one is you don't have to be someone who goes out late at night to understand how important this is to our state. You can be someone who's in bed by 9pm and you would never be out any later than that.

But our cities, our economy, our revenue, our public safety, the entire operations and infrastructure of our state and our cities relies on us having a thriving nighttime sector and nighttime economy.

Whether you want your restaurants and your cafes to be open, you want people to come to conventions in your city, you want there to be enough revenue so that we can pay for the public services like policing, you want to have a city that is safer, that people want to live in and come to visit, you should care about the nighttime economy and the nighttime sector.

And that's part of the message that we're having that we wanted to share today. It is not optional. It is not something that only some people do. All of us rely on this being a sector that is thriving and supporting. And for so many people, it is the source of their livelihood.

They, Their jobs, their small businesses, but also their culture and their community. It is what keeps them connected. It is what brings them to our city to want to live, work, and visit. And so it is not optional. It is infrastructure, and we should invest in it and treat it as such.

And I just want to close by again thanking everyone who participated and also thanking everyone in our state who is a part of this nighttime sector. The small business owners, the workers, the patrons, the people who have built out thoughtful public policy and shown that this could work.

Our police officers, our first responders, everyone who participates in this during what has been a very challenging time.

We see you, we appreciate you, our artists, our musicians, and we are going to continue to do whatever we can here to be champions for you and to shift this really misguided notion that we should be afraid of the dark, that we should be afraid of nighttime, that we should. We should shun it, we should stigmatize it.

We have to bring it out into the light in some. In many ways to. To. To be able to demonstrate that we need it, we need to support it. It's essential to our state. And if we can help it thrive even more so than it is now, we will all be better off because of it. Good.

Or you want to.

Great work, Mr. Chair. Appreciate you. All right. Thank you.

All right. Appreciate everyone's work on this. Thanks for. For participating. This hearing's adjust sa.