Here are excerpts from what Joran Slane read yesterday in front of Seminole City Council. For more info on the issue go to Southeast Music Alliance.

"The venues at which we play can be bars, nightclubs, outdoor concert venues, city parks (as well as other non-traditional performance spaces), but the businesses that seem to be in jeopardy with the passing of Ordinance 08, are the clubs – to the untrained eye, these may look like a bar, but inside they have expensive in-house sound and light systems and capacities large enough to hold nationally touring productions whose success will depend not solely on beverage sales, but ticket and merchandise sales to a target market usually between 13 and 18 years old.

Underage drinking and violence needs to be taken out of this equation. Alcoholic refreshments are served at sporting events and art openings and the majority of these people do NOT attend these events solely to drink. I would venture to say that 95% of the teens at a concert are there to connect with their peers through interaction with the music and shutting down these local businesses (which is what will happen) and forcing the teens to other cities to attend concerts only displaces or postpones the true problem of poor education and parenting in your city or county and ineffective security at the clubs.

This article appears in Aug 15-21, 2007.