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VIRGINIA BEACH — Fans of Pharrell Williams’ Something in the Water festival are buying tickets and booking hotel rooms for the spring event. Now, it’s the City Council’s turn to show its support.
The council will vote Tuesday on providing $500,000 in advance to the festival producers to help with marketing efforts. The money will be recouped through admissions, meals and sales tax from the festival, set for April 28-30 at the Oceanfront. Virginia Beach also will provide other in-kind contributions, including the use of resort-area stages and the convention center.
At the same meeting, the council will vote on two contentious items that were deferred: The plastic bag tax and changes to the city’s noise ordinance.
To help keep plastic bags out of area waterways and encourage shoppers to use recyclable ones, Virginia Beach environmental groups want to impose a five-cent tax on disposable plastic bags provided in grocery stores, convenience stores and drugstores.
Councilman Guy Tower, who sponsored the proposed tax earlier this year, wants to withdraw it to give the newly elected members a chance to weigh in and carry it forward in the new year, he said by phone Friday. Tower is leaving the council at the end of December.
He and Councilman John Moss also have been working with the city attorney and gathering public feedback on changing the city’s noise ordinance, which Tower said is ineffective.
It currently requires police to use a sound level meter to catch offenders. Proposed changes to the law would allow an official to assess noise levels by hearing alone, with civil penalties starting at $250.
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The two council members are recommending that the civil enforcement be executed by a third party, while police would handle criminal enforcement.
“It should have the votes to pass,” Moss said Friday.
Tower said it’s been an interesting experience in trying to find a common sense approach to the noise issue.
“We’re not trying to change the way people behave, we’re just trying to have a framework for people who just refuse to comply with what most people would say are normal behavioral standards,” Tower said.
The city’s tourism industry originally pushed for changes to the noise law, after becoming fed up with people known as buskers who play loud music on the Boardwalk at night and disturb hotel guests.
The Resort Advisory Commission, which is comprised of representatives from the city’s hotel and restaurant community, recently decided to take a different approach. It wants buskers to obtain a permit to entertain in public spaces, borrowing the idea from Ocean City, New Jersey, said committee chair Randy Thompson.
Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com