City trying (again) to crack down on degenerate Fremont Street Experience performers
Do you think the Fremont Street Experience is a private area, owned by a private company? After all, they do things like charge admission to the area on New Year's Eve, which you couldn't see happening on a public street.
Or, perhaps, do you believe it's considered public space, like any other street or sidewalk?
It turns out that the answer is "neither".
The Fremont Street Experience is owned by a private company called.... "Fremont Street Experience", and some of its management are also executives at surrounding casinos. Furthermore, the upkeep and expense of the area is the responsibility of the company, not the city.
However, at the same time, it is still considered a public space, as it was converted to a pedestrian mall from the iconic Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. The city put up 2/3 of the money for the expensive conversion, the most costly portion being the famed light-show canopy, which cost $64 million. It opened in 1995.
This lack of clarity of public-versus-private space has created endless headaches for the city, casino owners, and tourists alike. The First Amendment of the Constitution grants all Americans the right to street performance. This is because street performance is considered a form of speech, and the government cannot restrict free speech in public places.
Street performers are attracted to the Fremont Street Experience because it is the largest pedestrian mall in the city (by a wide margin), and a high percentage of people there are tourists. This, in turn, leads to a lot of lucrative tips. Fremont Street Experience would prefer these performers -- whose behavior can range from nuisance to obscene at times -- weren't present. However, given that it's technically public land, they can't kick them out.
From 1995 to 2010, the city actually had some fairly restrictive rules in place regarding unapproved street performers. However, the ACLU got involved, and these rules were abandoned. They were replaced by much more permissive rules in 2011, in part crafted by the ACLU itself.
However, as you might guess, this led to street performers immediately swarming the area, and often getting into arguments and fistfights over the most coveted performance spaces in the area. Finally, in 2015 the city had enough, and with the ACLU's help, implemented a new system to reserve space for street performers.
The new system was daily lottery where performers would register, and then get randomly assigned one of the 40 or so 6-foot "circles" drawn on the pavement. These performers would only get a two-hour slot, and then would have to leave.
https://networkinvegas.com/wp-conten...sonfremont.jpg
As you might guess, this was exploited by opportunistic performers, who simply registered tons of duplicate accounts for "registration", and then would win rights to a large number of spaces each day. Then, with far more spaces than they could use, they would sell their spaces to other performers, who were desperate for a place to take their act!
Not what the city intended, right?
Unfortunately, little could be done to stop this, under the current rules. The ACLU insisted that no identification would be required to register for this "lottery", nor would performers have to show ID to claim their space. Obviously this was ripe for abuse, and it's been getting worse each year.
The city is now proposing that performers would have to show valid ID upon first-time registration for the system, and that the photo from the ID would be included in the granting of the performance space. If the performer does not match the photo, their space isn't valid.
It is likely there will be a legal challenge to this, again by the ACLU.
You might wonder why the city didn't simply sell the land to Fremont Street Experience in 1995, and allow them to make it a private area. I can only guess that this was done to save money. Notice that the city does NOT pay for the upkeep of the area, which is a huge savings to them. It probably looked like a great deal at the time. Put up 2/3 of the initial budget for renovation, and then someone else foots the bill to take care of this public land for perpetuity, even though it remains a public space!
That's great... until you want to induce regulations on how people can behave in that public space, and all of a sudden degenerate "performers" are declaring their rights to free speech.
These performers, while occasionally interesting to watch, have mostly been a nuisance. They have caused these issues and more:
- Aggressive tip hustling
- Scamming
- Performing dangerous stunts involving viewers which end up causing injury
- Fights and confrontations with other tourists and each other
- Drug dealing
What a mess.
