Permit denied for Sunset Junction, but city may revisit Wednesday if organizers can foot $141,000 tab

Kevin Bronson on
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The Los Angeles Board of Public Works voted this morning 3-1 to deny a permit for this weekend’s Sunset Junction Street Fair – but the matter may be reconsidered at the commissioners’ next meeting on Wednesday morning.

With only Commissioner Valerie Lynn Shaw – who admitted she’d never heard of Sunset Junction until this year’s brouhaha with the city – dissenting, the board sided with a recommendation from city staff and legal counsel that a permit for this year’s street fair be denied until $141,000 in fees are paid. They left open the option to reconsider granting a permit at their next meeting at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.

The upshot appears to be that Sunset Junction needs $141,000 for this year’s festival to happen.

Those fees are to cover this year’s budgeted services – including police, fire and transportation – because city ordinance requires that event promoters pay those costs up front. Still at issue are some $267,000 in fees the city says it is owed from the 2010 festival (an amount organizers of the street fair dispute), but last year’s tab did not factor into the board’s decision to deny this year’s permit.

The vote followed a three-hour hearing that included emotional comments – for and against – from dozens of residents, artists, business owners and, poignantly, youth who have benefited from the Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance’s programs. No one disputed Sunset Junction’s good intentions – nor the contributions it has made over its three-decade-plus existence in unifying, and even helping gentrify, one of L.A.’s oldest neighborhoods.

But longtime Sunset Junction organizer Michael McKinley struggled to save face under scrutiny from the commissioners, dancing around questions about his organization’s budget and denying seeing a critical e-mail from the city about fee policies. That, along with the assertion from Yusef Robb, a spokesman for Councilman Eric Garcetti’s office, that the district’s “constituents are overwhelming against” the festival did not bode well for any 11th-hour deal-making.

Not that the commissioners were in a position to do so. Without grappling with 2010’s disputed fees, they made their decision based strictly on city law.

Said one resident: “I love rock ’n’ roll, I love cotton candy, I love a street fair, but I love one that pays its bills.”

The festival is scheduled to happen Aug. 27-28 in a nine-block area on and around Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, with the Butthole Surfers, Hanson, the Melvins, Bobby Womack, Ozomatli, Art Brut and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah among the 80-plus music acts performing.

Photo by Laurie Scavo