Mayor Greg Nickels's proposed nightlife regulations, which would crack down on clubs but leave other nighttime venues to their own rowdy devices, seem genetically engineered to leave everyone involved unsatisfied. Club owners chafe at the regulations, which would force them to patrol the sidewalks outside their venues and make it easier for the city to shut them down. City council members bristle at the premise that cracking down on club owners, instead of increasing police enforcement, is the best way to stop the nuisance crimes that cluster in nightlife districts. And neighbors of those districts are frustrated by the fact that the proposed regulations disproportionately target clubs (defined in the legislation as establishments that serve booze after 10:00 p.m. and offer "amplified entertainment") while leaving far more prevalent bars (those without entertainment) unscathed.

Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, August 16, in the city's claustrophobic Boards and Commissions Room, the mayor's Nightlife Task Force held what was ostensibly its final meeting, although it was the first opportunity task force members had had to discuss the details of the mayor's legislation. Belying Film and Music Office Director James Keblas's breezy pronouncement that bar and club owners were "getting close to finalizing" a list of nightclub regulations, the meeting (which drew a dozen or so observers to the concrete basement of city hall) was a tense, often fraught affair, with bar and club owners handing mayoral staffer Jordan Royer a heavily edited and red-lined list of proposed changes to the mayor's proposed legislation. The changes, many of them significant, encompassed nearly every single paragraph of the ordinance.

Among the provisions bar and club owners found most troubling were a section requiring club owners to "prevent" patrons from behaving violently or bringing in weapons or drugs ("I am not going to pat down my customers," Red Door owner Pete Hanning said. "If they try to keep it the way they had it written, we'll scream bloody murder."); a provision requiring club owners to patrol the area up to 100 feet outside their clubs for half an hour before and after closing time ("In Belltown, you'd have people crisscrossing people up and down the street," Hanning said); and a section requiring club staff to call 911 any time they witness illegal behavior of any kind ("Panhandling and smoking crack are illegal too—we'd all be calling 911 constantly," Showbox co-owner Jeff Steichen said. Club owners are concerned that frequent 911 calls will give the city legal ammunition against a club. Asked if 911 calls had ever been used against a club he represented, club attorney David Osgood responded, "Every single time.").

Although Nickels initially claimed his task force would provide resources for club owners to navigate the city's maze of regulations, the proposal as written offers virtually nothing to improve the business climate for club owners, save a lone "ombudsperson" to implement the new regulations. And there's nothing in the proposal to increase police presence in nighttime hot spots, probably the single most effective thing the city could do to improve nightlife for club patrons and neighborhood residents.

Even more disappointing for neighborhood residents, the ordinance—which came out of a task force on "nightlife," not clubs—doesn't apply to bars at all. That means that in Fremont, which has reported a dramatic surge in violence, noise, and public-urination incidents in recent years, only three businesses—Nectar, the High Dive, and ToST—would be affected. How would this cut down on drunken unruliness from the dozens of other drinking establishments in the area? No one at the mayor's office is answering that question. "The issues of people being loud and inebriated and pissing in your yard are only going to increase" unless the city does something to address those problems directly, Hanning says. "This new license doesn't do anything about it." The proposal, in other words, gives the impression that Nickels is delivering for fed-up neighbors while doing little or nothing to actually address their concerns.

Task force member Vafa Ghazi, president of the Fremont Neighborhood Council, told me a few days after the meeting that he was "beginning to have some concerns" about the regulations. "I think live music is a good thing. I don't think bars, in particular, should be penalized for having live bands," said Ghazi, who would like to see the regulations apply to bars in general, not just nightclubs. One main issue, he said, is that Fremont doesn't have the infrastructure (roads, cops, parking lots) to absorb all the new bars that have opened in recent years. "When you let a bar open, they can have the best intentions, but their clients will contribute to the problem, because there's a limit to what these streets can take," Ghazi says. "This is not an issue that has been addressed at all."

The city council, for its part, didn't seem any more satisfied with the mayor's proposal than neighborhood residents or bars. At a meeting of the council's neighborhoods committee at the Capitol Hill library last week, Council Members Peter Steinbrueck and Richard McIver tore into the proposal, arguing that it would do nothing to address neighborhood crime and could lead to selective enforcement against clubs that cater to people of color. "I want to see how you're going to effectively enforce this legislation with an even hand," McIver told Keblas at last week's meeting. "I think nine-tenths of our police officers are wonderful people... but when they start dictating to people what they need to do, one could call it collusion. I have some big problems with that." Steinbrueck, meanwhile, asked Keblas how the mayor's legislation "is different from former City Attorney Mark Sidran's added-activities ordinance," which was ruled unconstitutional in 1999. Added activities, like the mayor's proposal, required clubs to get additional permits if they wanted to offer "added activities"—dancing in the case of Sidran's ordinance, live entertainment or DJs in the case of Nickels's.

"I am pro-music and pro-nightlife, and the mayor is pro-music and pro-nightlife," Keblas, sounding frustrated, responded. (His comments echoed earlier statements by mayoral staffer Royer that only clubs at which "it's a pattern, it's a lot of incidents, it's a surprise to nobody" would be targeted by the city.) And while no one on the council would probably challenge that assertion, regulations last longer than any particular council or mayor, and unless both sides can reach an agreement, the potential for selective enforcement remains a real concern.

With so much still unresolved, you might think the task force would need to meet again to reach a compromise on draft legislation. (Indeed, last week was the first time the task force had sat down to discuss the legislation itself; at the last meeting, the task force was given only a two-page outline.) Instead, the mayor's office has decided to fast-track the process, moving the date it will send legislation to the city council up from January to September. "The conversations have been so productive with the community and the task force that we feel like... we're ready to present it to the council," mayoral staffer Emile East told Council Member Sally Clark's neighborhoods committee Thursday.

But those on the task force, as well as representatives for the ad hoc Seattle Nightlife and Music Association, strongly disagree with that characterization of the negotiations. Last week, Hanning said fast-tracking the process was "not at all appropriate. This was the most productive meeting we've ever had, and yet Jordan [Royer] and the mayor's office were saying it was the last meeting."

Discussions between the mayor's office, the task force, and the music association were expected to continue this week, with the mayor's office reportedly willing to budge on some of the so-called operating standards (the requirement that clubs police the sidewalks outside their premises, for example) and unwilling to move an inch on others (such as a proposal by the task force that would create a city entertainment commission and give it real regulatory power). However, association lobbyist Tim Hatley says, it's unlikely that the council will take up the legislation as quickly as Nickels wants, if only because the council will be mired in budget discussions starting in September. "Realistically, there's no way it will happen until January," Hatley says.