Event production in Clewiston
where the festival permit does not lift the noise line and the approval has to grant the hours

Most cities on this programme fold a concert into a generic special-event chapter and leave the planner to work out which rules apply. Clewiston does something different. Chapter 10, Article II is a festival article, and it says what it is for. Section 10-19 states its purpose as regulating any gathering for the purpose of listening to or participating in entertainment which consists primarily of musical renditions.

Section 10-20 defines the term. A music or entertainment festival is the gathering of groups or individuals for that purpose, and the definition takes in both live and prerecorded music. A DJ set and a touring band are the same thing to this article.

Section 10-44 is where it bites. No person may promote, sponsor, organize, conduct or sell tickets for any musical or entertainment festival in the city where more than 750 people will be in attendance unless he first secures from the City Commission a special event permit for each festival. Two words in that sentence carry the weight. Each means a series is not covered by one approval. Commission means the decision is made at a public meeting, not at a desk.

The number is the hinge of the whole page. Below it, the festival article does not apply to the gathering. Above it, the approval is a commission item with the conditions that follow in the next section. A producer planning a crowd of around seven hundred is making a decision about which side of the line the show sits on, and that is a conversation to have with the city before the date is announced rather than after.

The article is older than it looks and newer than it looks. It dates from Ord. No. 82-3, adopted March 15, 1982, and was amended by Ord. No. 91-4 in 1991. Section 10-46 was amended again by Ord. No. 2025-02 on April 21, 2025. This is current law that has recently been revisited, not a dormant article nobody has opened in forty years.

Section 10-45 sends the written application to the City Manager at least 30 days before the festival commences. The permit issues only once the plans and minimum conditions the section lists are met. Several of them read like a production checklist, and they are worth taking in the order the code gives them.

• (9) Plans for camp construction, sanitation, sewage disposal, garbage and refuse disposal, drainage, insect and rodent control, water supply and food service, evaluated against the state sanitary code as a minimum.
• (10) A plan for internal security, traffic control, communications, fire protection and emergency services in and around the festival area, received by and coordinated with the Chief of Police, the Fire Chief and the county ambulance service. Three agencies, not one, and the plan is coordinated with them rather than merely filed.
• (11) A traffic control and parking plan for outside the festival area, approved by the city. And no motor vehicle shall be permitted in the performance area except when necessary to enforce compliance or in an emergency.
• (12) Any applicant staging a festival after dark, or allowing patrons to remain after dark, must provide a plan for electrical illumination of the parking facilities and the festival area, so that both are lighted at all times.
• (13) A plan for garbage, trash and rubbish pickup.
• (14) A plot plan drawn to scale showing the performance area and all the facilities the article requires.
• (15) The number of tickets printed or to be printed, and the printer's name and address. No more than 5,000 tickets may be printed for any one music festival without further approval.

Item (11) deserves a second reading by anyone who builds. A performance area with no motor vehicles in it is a performance area where the stage, the PA and the lighting arrive by hand, by cart or before the area is designated. The load-in path is a plan item, not something solved on the day.

Item (12) is the other one. The lighting requirement covers the parking facilities as well as the festival area, and it applies at all times, which means the plan for the lot has to be as complete as the plan for the stage. Show power and work lighting for a parking area are part of the same drawing.

Section 10-46 sets the permit fee as a proportion of the ticket price multiplied by the number of tickets printed. The fee therefore follows the print run. It does not follow attendance on the night, and it does not follow the size of the production. A festival with a modest stage and a large print run pays on the print run; a big production with a small print run pays on that. The ordinance sets the proportion, and the section itself is the place to read it.

That has a planning consequence a production office can use. The number of tickets printed is stated on the application under section 10-45(15), and it is the figure the fee is built on. Printing a short run and reprinting later is not a neutral choice, because the ceiling at 5,000 tickets calls for further approval.

Section 10-47 turns to protection. The applicant provides a cash, liability, property or surety bond, or liability insurance written by a company authorized in the state. It must indemnify the city, the commission and the owners of the property adjoining the festival site. The adjoining owners are named in the ordinance itself. In a city with cane fields, groves and residential blocks close to its public ground, that is a real class of people and the code treats them as parties to the protection.

The amount is determined by the City Commission case by case. The ordinance sets the form of the protection and who it covers, and leaves the limit to the commission. A producer should treat the limit as an open question until the commission has answered it, and should ask the City Manager's office what it expects before the application is filed.

The city's own special events page tells applicants to submit the event application at least four weeks before the event date. Section 10-45 of the code requires the festival application at least 30 days before the festival commences. Four weeks and thirty days are not the same number of days. A show that lands on the wrong side of the difference is a show that applied late.

The advice is simple. Work to the longer number, and treat the commission calendar as a separate constraint on top of it. Section 10-44 sends the permit to the City Commission, so the real deadline is whichever comes first of the thirty days and the last commission meeting that can act in time. The application can be complete and on time and still miss the meeting.

The events page adds a note on food. An approved city special event permit changes what mobile food vendors may do. Without one, mobile food vendors are limited to Mondays and Tuesdays, 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., on commercially or industrially zoned property with the owner's written permission, under Ordinance No. 2024-14. That is the catering and food-truck answer for an outdoor event in this city. Food trucks on an event weekend are an approval item, not a given, and the vendor list belongs in the application conversation.

This is the single most useful thing a producer can know about Clewiston, so it is stated here without softening. The noise article contains no exemption for a permitted special event, and no exemption for government-sanctioned activity. The festival permit in Chapter 10 does not, on the face of either chapter, lift the 10 p.m. line in Chapter 34.

Read the two chapters side by side and the gap is plain. Chapter 10 decides whether a festival may be held and under what conditions. Chapter 34 decides when sound may be heard and from how far. Neither refers to the other. A commission can approve a festival and the approval does not mention the hour at which the amplified sound has to stop, so the permit and the noise line are two separate things a producer has to satisfy.

Section 34-90(a) makes it unlawful to make or continue any loud and raucous noise. It defines a noise nuisance by volume level, duration and character, as judged by reasonable persons of ordinary sensibilities. The measure is not an instrument. It is a judgment about how the sound lands on the people hearing it.

Section 34-90(c) adds only that the subsections are not intended to regulate the usual and customary noise incidental to urban life. That is a limit on the article's reach into everyday sound. It is not an exemption for a stage.

A reasonable planning assumption follows. Build the run of show so that amplified sound ends at 10 p.m., and if a later finish is wanted, raise it with the city in writing as a request that needs an answer, since nothing on the face of either chapter grants it.

Two subsections of section 34-90 set the evening line, and they are written differently.

Subsection (b)(2): operating a sound-reproducing device between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. so as to be plainly audible at a distance of 50 feet from the building, structure or vehicle in which it is located is prima facie evidence of a violation. The test has an hour, a distance and a standard. Fifty feet is a short distance, and the standard is plain audibility, not a meter reading.

Subsection (b)(7): the use of electronic sound amplification producing sound capable of being heard more than 50 feet from the source between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. is prohibited in the Agriculture District, One Single-Family District, Multiple-Family District, Commercial District and Industrial District. The ban is enumerated by zone, not stated citywide. Which zone a site is in is therefore the first thing to confirm, and the inclusion of the agriculture district matters in a city ringed by cane.

A producer reading this will want to know the zone of the site. The text does not say that a park, a street or a lawn sits in one of the five. That depends on the city's zoning map for the specific address, and it is a question for the planning office rather than something to assume from the surroundings.

The operational centre of the noise article for a production is subsection (b)(6). It prohibits the operation of a pile driver, power shovel, pneumatic hammer, derrick, steam or electric hoist or other appliance attended by loud or unusual noise between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., and at any time on Sundays.

A chain hoist is the appliance a rigging call runs on. If the production's motors read as electric hoists under this subsection, then the working window for turning them is 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday to Saturday, and Sunday carries no hours at all. A Sunday strike that turns motors is the one call this ordinance stops outright.

The wording needs care. The subsection names construction appliances, and a production decides for itself whether its hoists read as such. The text does not settle it. That is exactly why the question belongs in the pre-production conversation with the city, in writing, and not at 7 p.m. on a Sunday with a truss in the air.

Subsection (b)(4) sets the companion hours for buildings. The erection, excavation, demolition, alteration or repair of any building is a loud and raucous noise other than between 7:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. on weekdays, except in urgent necessity, and then only with a permit from the Community Development Director. The director may grant permission for work between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., on application made when the permit is awarded or during the progress of the work.

The practical effect for a Saturday night show is that the strike, if it turns hoists, is a Saturday-evening problem, because the next morning is a Sunday. A load-out that depends on a Sunday morning is a load-out to settle with the city in advance.

Clewiston has no parks-and-recreation chapter at all. The park rules live inside the chapter on streets, sidewalks and certain public places. All of Article IV was enacted by Ord. No. 2024-01 on February 19, 2024, which makes it the newest park article of any city covered on this site.

Section 62-99(a) opens city parks from sunrise to sunset and closes them otherwise. Those hours do not apply to official city activities or to activities granted via special event application when such approval specifically authorizes longer hours.

The emphasis belongs on specifically authorizes. Holding a permit is not the same as holding extended hours. An approval that is silent on hours leaves an evening show inside a closed park. The producer's job is to read the approval for the hours, not for the word "approved".

Section 62-99(b) gives the consequence. Remaining in a city park during closed hours constitutes trespass, and no person shall remain after a lawful command to leave from a law enforcement officer, regardless of whether the park is open. Two things follow. A crew inside a park after the closing hour without an approval that grants the time is trespassing. And a lawful command to leave from an officer stands even inside open hours.

Section 62-100 lists what is unlawful in city parks. It opens with a carve-out: the list does not apply to a governmental agency within the scope of its authority, or unless specifically permitted to do so by a permit. Among the listed acts:

• (3) construct any structures;
• (4) cook foodstuffs except where permitted by the city;
• (5) start or stoke fires;
• (7) dig or otherwise disturb the natural ground surface, or damage or remove plants, trees, shrubs or any other part of park grounds;
• (8) erect or affix signs to any park structures except those posted by the city or as directed by the city manager;
• (11) operate or park any motor vehicle except in designated parking areas.

The production conclusion is direct. In a Clewiston park the permit is not paperwork around the build. It is the authority for the build. Each of the items above maps onto something a production does:

• A stage deck, a tent and a tower read as structures.
• A stake or a ground screw reads as disturbing the natural ground surface, which makes ballast the default and stakes the exception that has to be written down.
• Propane and open flame read as fire, and a cooking line reads as cooking.
• A sponsor banner on a park structure reads as affixing a sign.
• The truck that carries all of it cannot leave a designated parking area. Item (11) is the same constraint that section 10-45(11) puts on a festival performance area, from the park side.

Section 62-101 prohibits camping on park property, and defines it to include the use of camping facilities such as tents, RV campers or other temporary shelters, non-city-designated cooking facilities such as fires or portable stoves, and cots, beds or hammocks.

The textual point deserves care and should not be overclaimed. The unless-specifically-permitted clause appears in the preamble of section 62-100. It does not appear in section 62-101. So a production tent, or a talent trailer, is the item to raise with the city in writing rather than to assume. The definition lists tents and temporary shelters by kind and says nothing about purpose, and whether a backstage tent is a shelter in this sense is for the city to say.

The Clewiston Inn was built in 1926, destroyed by fire in 1937 and rebuilt in 1938 to a Classical Revival design by L. Phillips Clarke of West Palm Beach with Edgar S. Wortman. It was built for The Clewiston Company, the development arm of Southern Sugar, and ownership passed to the United States Sugar Corporation in 1931. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 21, 1991, reference number 91000106. Its Everglades Lounge carries a 360-degree wildlife mural painted by J. Clinton Shepherd in the early 1940s. Venue directories list the inn at 57 guest rooms and one meeting room. No published ballroom square footage, ceiling height, door or freight dimension, or power detail could be found anywhere.

John Boy Auditorium, at 1200 West C. Owen Avenue, is listed in venue directories at 350 seated and 400 standing across two meeting rooms. Those figures come from a venue directory listing, not from a technical drawing published by the building. A producer treats them as a starting point to confirm, not as a specification. No total meeting space, largest-room size, ceiling height, stage dimension, grid or dock detail is published.

The Dixie Crystal Theatre opened in 1941 to a design by Chester A. Cone, with Earl Anderson as builder, and measures 45 by 93 feet in plan. It was added to the National Register on September 25, 1998, reference number 98001202. It is named here as a historic building and not as a bookable room, because it no longer operates as a theatre.

Here is the general point, and for a producer it is the most useful paragraph on the page. Clewiston is the third city in a row on this site whose principal rooms publish no stage dimensions, no fly or grid height and no dock detail. When a building publishes nothing, the only safe procedure is to measure it yourself, on a site visit, before anything is quoted, drawn or trucked. A listing in a directory is where the conversation starts. It is not a plan.

Venues are described here only by what their owners and public registers publish.

Clewiston sits behind the Herbert Hoover Dike, and its access to Lake Okeechobee runs through the S-310 structure, where the city's boat ramps sit. A navigation lock operated by the South Florida Water Management District keeps published hours. Those hours have been shortened seasonally and have changed during dike rehabilitation work.

No hours are given here, because the figure moves. The operational point is what matters. Anything arriving or leaving by water is on the lock's clock rather than the show's, and the hours for the specific date must be confirmed with the district before a waterborne load-in is planned at all.

This is the same principle as the park hours and the noise line, applied to the water. A schedule that belongs to someone else sets the edges of the day, and the run of show is built inside it. A waterborne delivery that misses the lock is not late by an hour. It is late by whatever the lock's next opening allows.

The nearest city on this site, across the lake, is Belle Glade, and the comparison is worth making because the two are close enough on the map to be planned as one.

They do not run on the same clock. Clewiston's amplified-sound line falls at 10 p.m., which is earlier than Belle Glade's 11 p.m. sound line. A show that is lawful to the last song in Belle Glade is an hour over in Clewiston.

The tests differ too. Clewiston states a 50-foot test in section 34-90(b)(2). Belle Glade's sound subsection does not state a distance at all. A producer in Clewiston has a number to measure against, and a producer in Belle Glade does not.

The other cities on the Treasure Coast are read the same way, from each one's own code, on their own pages: Stuart, Fort Pierce, Port St. Lucie and Vero Beach. They are cities on the coast, with their own chapters and their own numbers, and what applies to a show in one does not carry over to the next. Each page is the place to read that city's rules in its own words.

Clewiston has a lot of rules, but they point the same way. Each one asks for a decision in writing from someone with the authority to give it, and none of them is satisfied by the permit alone. A sensible order for the first conversation with the city:

• Which side of 750. If the attendance is expected to pass it, the festival article applies and the commission decides.
• The application date. Count back from the longer of four weeks and thirty days, then check the commission calendar.
• The hours, in the approval. If the show is in a park and runs after sunset, the approval has to specifically authorize longer hours.
• The sound line. The permit does not lift the 10 p.m. line, so ask whether the city will treat a request as any different.
• The hoists. Ask whether the production's motors read as hoists under section 34-90(b)(6), and plan around Sunday either way.
• The ground. Ballast is the default. Anything that goes into the ground is written down and permitted.
• The tent and the trailer. Raise both in writing, since section 62-101 has no permit clause.
• The building. If the show is indoors, measure it on a site visit before anything is quoted.

None of this makes Clewiston a difficult city. It makes it a city where the answers are written down and the questions are specific, which is easier to plan against than a code that says nothing.