Code Enforcement Can't Close a Door
Downtown doesn't need to be louder, it just needs consistency
Since 2009 the Fullerton City Council has been going back and forth with bar owners and their proxies on City Staff, specifically in the Community Development Department, over how loud Downtown Fullerton should be on any given night.
The short version of this story is that staff is trying to implement a “noise zone” in Downtown Fullerton. Despite building housing basically on top of the bars (and approving a hotel at the train station), somehow it makes sense to make this mixed-use residential area LOUDER.
The slightly longer version of the Noise Zone saga is that it’s simply a plan by bureaucrats and incompetent Council Members (currently championed by Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles) to raise the allowed ambient noise in the Downtown Business District.
This is where staff baffles Council with bullshit about logarithmic scales, open field testing and a bunch of other sound related nonsense to make themselves sound well-informed.
It effectively would allow businesses - between Chapman to the North, Highland to the West, Santa Fe to the South, and Lemon to the East - to play music louder than they currently do because something something it’s too hard to enforce right now.
I’m not joking or being facetious. The entire point of raising the allowable volume in Downtown is because City Hall claims that it’s currently too ambiguous and too difficult to enforce;
“Current maximum allowable sound levels are at 55 dBA per FMC 15.90, which is essentially unenforceable based on standard operation noise levels.”
This difficulty in enforcement, they claim, therefore necessitates that Council relax the rules, allow bars to get louder, and then, and only then, will Code Enforcement start to punish people violating the newer, weaker rules.
But after years of looking into this issue and comparing sound levels something finally occurred to me by way of a pop-emo ballad from 2005;
I chime in with a
"Haven't you people ever heard of closing the goddamn door?"
—“I Write Sins Not Tragedies” by Panic! At The Disco.
Trust me, that line will make sense in a minute.
In trying to really figure out what staff was on about, I put in a Public Records Request regarding citations in the Downtown area to find out if they were telling the truth about enforcement and according to the City’s own data there is basically zero enforcement regarding noise.
This isn’t a shock because City Hall admits that they don’t enforce the noise ordinances - that’s their sales pitch.
If we look at the data, for example between January 2018-Present, Fullerton PD has not issued a single citation for a noise complaint to any bar or nightclub in Fullerton. In fact, they’ve only issued 6 citations total for noise anywhere in the City during that time - all to residences.
Most noise complaints fall on Code Enforcement’s Enforcement Officers who never appear to have issued a single citation except during the covid-lockdowns and even then those were sparse, sporadic, and appear somewhat targeted.
It’s important to talk about Downtown code enforcement activity since the Governor’s Entertainment Lockdown Orders ended back in the middle of 2021 and we need to compare what happened during the lockdowns with what happened before or since.
When code enforcement catches somebody breaking the law they can ignore it, give a warning and log it for future reference or issue an “administrative citation” which carries a fine as set by State law. A 1st citation is $100, a 2nd is $200, a 5th is $500 and subsequent citations stay at $500 each.
In 2020 there were 41 administrative citations issued across 11 businesses over 20 days between 20 August and 27 November. Each with fines attached.
(Those 11 businesses were 2J's, D'Vine, Garcia's SOB, Heroes, InCahoots, JP23, Matador, Revolucion, Roscoe's, Totally 80s, & Ziings)
Here’s one of the more impressive examples:
There were an additional 10 log entries for the same types of violations without citations being issued for some unexplained reason and those look like this:
All said, the records request show us a total of 51 noted or cited violations as documented by Code Enforcement Officers with 48 of those entries showing up a Friday or Saturday which one might expect, after all the bars are busiest on weekends.
That means that Code Enforcement managed to notice problems or write citations on 20 of 30 possible Fridays or Saturdays in that 3 month window between 20 August and 27 November 2020.
That’s actually pretty damning for the downtown bar owners. Approve of the lockdowns or not, Code Enforcement wrote citations at an alarming rate what with so many businesses struggling to stay open.
While Florentines & Slidebar were closing down, D’Vine was getting handed 10 citations with Garcia’s South of the Border and Revolucion getting 8 each and so forth down the line.
Yet once the Governor lifted his ban on entertainment, he appears to have removed the desire and ability of Fullerton’s Code Enforcement to find any problems whatsoever in Downtown.
Not a single citation post-lockdown appears in the public records request. NOT ONE.
I want to run a little math here and then we’ll get to the song lyric, I promise.
See, those orders ended on 11 June 2021, which left 29 remaining weeks in that year, with 52 weeks in both 2022 & 2023, and 9 weeks so far in 2024, giving us a total of 142 weeks.
Supposing restaurant and bar related issues are the worst on weekends, Fridays and Saturdays specifically, Staff has had 284 chances over 142 weekends to patrol Downtown and make sure the rules were being followed.
Amazingly Code Enforcement only logged issues on 12 days in that timeframe, 7 Fridays and 5 Saturdays with two of those being back-to-back (so 11 different weekends).
That’s a working rate of 8% of weekends, or 4% of Fridays AND Saturdays.
FOUR. 4 Percent.
The most charitable reading of these abysmal numbers is that’s just how often Staff logged issues but I’d counter that you can’t walk around Downtown Fullerton on any Friday or Saturday without accidentally stumbling into egregious code violations.
We’re to believe that over 15 weekends in 2020 Staff found problems 67% of the time when the State was threatening to throw people in jail, but in the following 142 weekends it dropped to 4%?
Only Council could believe such rubbish.
I need to point out here that not a single citation was issued prior to those in late 2020. Not a single one in 2018, 2019, or the first 7 and a half months of 2020.
For some stark contrast, we here at Fullerton City News have visited Downtown, sound meter in hand, for the last 9 weekends which is more activity from us in 2 months than Code Enforcement managed in 3 years.
In that time we’ve witnessed obvious violations on every single weekend, yes despite the down-pouring of rain over several of those weekends.
Now even if we set aside the sound meter, wait for it…
I chime in with a
"Haven't you people ever heard of closing the goddamn door?"
Why does closing a door matter? Because in 13 of the 20 Code Enforcement Log entires since mid-June 2021, the reason for the notation is an open door;
Leaving your door open while having entertainment is itself a violation of the Municipal Code and that alone would require notation in the Enforcement Log.
This isn’t some optional issue. It’s literally a requirement to have an entertainment permit within the City of Fullerton;
3.08.140. Baseline operational requirements for Entertainment establishments.
M. All exterior doors and windows must be closed during the hours of Entertainment, except to allow ingress or egress of patrons, or in the case of emergencies.
Yet Staff would have us believe that Downtown Fullerton is a bastion of compliance despite all, and I mean all, of the evidence to the contrary.
The entire argument for raising the noise levels in Downtown Fullerton rests on the argument that it’s just too difficult to enforce the current noise regulations - despite it being possible during the lockdowns - and despite the now provable fact that Code Enforcement can’t be bothered to enforce closing a goddamn door.
It’s not just that they can’t be bothered, their own log shows the lack of effort put into even attempting enforcement.
Check out this notation from Bourbon Street from 24 March 2024 (likely meant to be 24 February):
“Advised to keep all doors closed during live entertainment. Refused to close doors - Contact with be made with BO.”
Bourbon Street had their doors open, were told to close them AND REFUSED and still Code Enforcement didn’t issue an administrative citation.
I’m sure the Business Owner (BO) will be super sure to close those doors knowing full well that nothing will happen to them otherwise.
If the policy of the City is to allow businesses to keep their doors open while having live entertainment then the code needs to change to reflect that outcome. There’s no honest or ethical reason to have coded violations with such non-existent enforcement that a business can straight tell Code Enforcement no to their faces without sanction.
This leads to conscious and law abiding citizens who follow the laws as written to lose out while favored businesses get a wink and nod, benefiting from an unfair market of biased outcomes.
If the policy is to keep businesses in compliance with the municipal code then the solution is simply to write administrative citations for violations and then to drag the non-compliant businesses in front of Planning Commission or Council and revoke their permits.
While Staff likes to waive away the abdication of their duties when it comes to the enforcement of noise levels, which again is their go-to argument for changing the code, the function of doors remains the same even in their newer shinier code as presented to Council back in February of this year.
You can go read the proposed ordinance and code changes and see that section 3.08.140 M remains unchanged. If you want to have entertainment in the City, you have to keep your doors closed. Plain and and simple. Or rather, open and shut. Pun intended.
Except obviously you don’t because Code Enforcement will never actually enforce that part of the code. Not historically. Not recently. Not ever.
Scroll back up and look at that chart of enforcement. They go months, sometimes YEARS, on end without even noting a single thing in their log and they certainly aren’t proactive.
In fact the first entry provided from 21 August 2020 was predicated upon a complaint to Code Enforcement as were several of the other entries. It seems fairly common for a complaint to be made and for code enforcement to go out, log the problem and a few others nearby, and then do nothing about any of them.
What we can surmise from this records release is that if you don’t call Code Enforcement they can’t be bothered to do their jobs despite all of the back-patting and accolades they like to give themselves for their long memories and hard work.
Not to belabor the point but they claim they don’t enforce the ambient noise levels required in the code because it’s too difficult and if only Council would change it they’d be hard at work keeping people in line.
Meanwhile there wasn’t a single log entry, let alone administrative citation, issued between October 2022 and present day. Not once did Code Enforcement find anything wrong in all of 2023 or the 2 months on either side of that year.
That 16 Month streak of doing nothing was only broken in 2024 because there were two complaints - one in January and one in February. In response to those Code Enforcement finally ventured into Downtown again at the end of February, AND VERIFIED THE COMPLAINTS WERE ONGOING, then they opted to hold nobody accountable for anything because of course.
I assume it’s a nice job if you can get it. $66,388.00 in total compensation in 2022 and you don’t even have to do the job with any regularity.
Even if we were to believe that Code Enforcement was actually hard at work since mid-2021 and that the 20 Municipal Code violations logged over those 12 weekends are the only code violations in all of Downtown Fullerton, we’d still have to ask why have no Citations ever been issued?
If only Council would allow the bars in Downtown Fullerton to raise their volumes and keep people awake with a little more ease, then and only then might code enforcement officers learn to close a goddamn door.
But that would require the City to approach these things with a sense of poise and rationality.