FIRE to Laguna Beach: please don't stop the music!

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Read FIRE’s letter to the Laguna Beach City Council:
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-letter-city-laguna-beach-august-14-2023

FIRE to Laguna Beach City Council: Let street performers perform!

Mike Bolger is an award-winning professional musician and street performer from Los Angeles with a diverse resume. If you’ve listened to Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jewel, or Jimmy Cliff — or watched SpongeBob SquarePants — you might have heard him playing trumpet or accordion.

But thanks to Laguna Beach’s unconstitutional restrictions on street performances, one place you won’t hear him making music is the Forest Avenue Promenade, a vibrant pedestrian mall in the heart of the city’s downtown.

Founded as a bohemian art colony in the early 20th century, Laguna Beach is perhaps the last place you’d expect to find “Footloose”-esque crackdowns on public artistic expression. But like a college with a campus “free speech zone,” the city prohibits street performances on the promenade outside of a small “performance deck” — known as the Stage on Forest — and even that area is accessible only to performers who meet the city’s approval and obtain a permit. The city enforced the policy against Bolger earlier this year, stopping him from playing outside the performance deck.

In a letter sent to the Laguna Beach City Council in August, FIRE explained that the city has no authority to so drastically limit expression in a traditional public forum like the Forest Avenue Promenade.