Event production in Davie
concerts, festivals and municipal builds

Chapter 20 of the Town Code is a special events chapter in its own right — not a section inside a parks chapter, not a page on an administration department's website, but fifteen numbered sections written for concerts, festivals, races, parades, circuses, carnivals, shows and exhibitions. Section 20-4(a) carries the deadline every summary of Davie repeats: an application for a special event permit must be made no later than sixty days prior to the commencement of such event.

The Special Event Permit Checklist published by the Parks, Recreation & Cultural Arts Department prints a timeline beneath that requirement, and the timeline begins earlier. It lists a pre-application meeting scheduled with a planner at no later than ninety days prior to the commencement of such event, with application submittal at sixty. The sixty-day figure in the ordinance is the submittal date. The real first date is thirty days in front of it, and it is a meeting rather than a filing.

Two further dates sit inside the same timeline and they belong to the town rather than the applicant. Town review comments are to be provided within ten days, and the applicant must respond to all comments in writing and revise or provide the necessary documents. That is a comment-and-resubmit cycle of the kind a site plan goes through, written into the schedule of an event permit, and it is the reason the thirty days between the meeting and the filing are not spare.

The back half of the clock is firmer than the front. Section 20-4(d) requires that every other state, county or town permit be obtained no later than thirty days prior, and section 20-6(c) repeats that for the building permits specifically — electrical, plumbing, mechanical and structural, no less than thirty days prior to the scheduled special event. A denial, if it comes, arrives under section 20-4(f) no later than forty-five days prior. So a production that files on the sixtieth day has fifteen days before the latest lawful denial, and thirty before the structural permits are due.

And section 20-4(a) opens with a restriction on what may be said in the meantime: no person shall initiate, sponsor, organise, promote, conduct or advertise a special event unless a permit has been obtained. The sentence sits in the ordinance itself. An on-sale date, a poster, a radio spot or an announcement is an act the chapter regulates, not a marketing decision taken alongside the permit.

The Town of Davie does not publish a bespoke event form. It publishes a Development Application Form, and the heading on it reads: the Town of Davie utilizes this development application form for various types of requests. The box a production ticks — Special Event Permit (SEP) — sits in a single column alongside Rezoning, Plat, Land Use Plan Amendment, Master Planned Development, Development of Regional Impact, Developer's Agreement, Design Variation, Site Plan Modification, Vacation of Right-of-Way, Variance and Temporary Use. One sheet, twenty-one request types, one tick per form.

The consequences of that shared form are not cosmetic. The same sheet instructs that the owner/petitioner information on the following sheets must be signed and notarized, and that the owner/petitioner also must be present at all scheduled public hearings. It asks for the parcel folio or identification number of the site. It carries a property owner's certification block, a notarial sworn to and subscribed before me line, and a separate authorisation naming whoever will act as the owner's representative.

The supplemental checklist is where the land development character becomes unmistakable. Alongside the application it requires one copy of the warranty deed or most recent tax bill and one certified and sealed survey dated within the last two years, with a legal description of the entire property. For a two-day festival on a field, the town asks for the instrument of title and a surveyor's seal.

Three practical consequences follow for anyone producing a show on ground they do not own. The landowner is a signatory, not a landlord to be notified — and a notarised one. The folio number and the survey have to come from that owner's records, which means the venue conversation and the permit conversation are the same conversation and it starts at the ninety-day meeting. And because the certification is sworn, a change of site after filing is not an amendment to a form; it restarts the sworn part of it.

The checklist also asks for business tax receipt licences, county and town, or 501(c)(3) documentation where applicable, and an optional donation line to the town's Community Endowment Fund that the form itself notes has no effect on the request.

Item six on the checklist is a letter of intent providing point-by-point proposed detail information relating to the submitted request, and it runs from (a) to (p). Most of it is what any city asks: the name and purpose of the event, the sponsoring organisations with addresses and telephone numbers, attendance estimate, street closings, food and alcohol vendors with copies of their state licences and the exact locations and times of sale, signs and banners, and the nature, time and place of the entertainment.

Four of the sixteen are unusual enough to change how a production writes the document.

(c) asks for the proposed dates and times of the special event including set-up and break-down dates and times. The load-in and the strike are declared content of the permit. They are not a window the production arranges privately with a venue around a permitted show day.

(o) asks whether utility services such as electrical power or water will be required, specifying the amount and type. That is a load figure and a service type, due with the application at sixty days — before, in most productions, the final rider and the final rig have settled.

(p) asks whether electrical wiring shall be installed, specifying installation details. Temporary distribution is described in the permit narrative rather than left to the electrical permit that follows at thirty days.

(n) asks whether the applicant proposes, in whole or in part, to hire off-duty police and fire personnel, with specific details. The staffing proposal is the applicant's to make first; sections 20-9 and 20-10 then give the two chiefs the last word on it.

And (e) is the clause a concert should read twice. Where the event is held within or near any residential district, the applicant adheres to the restrictions and conditions the director identifies as necessary to mitigate negative impacts on residents, including but not limited to specific activities and uses, the duration of the special event, the hours of operation and the level of amplified music. The permit can set the end time and the sound level directly, as conditions, written by one official.

Item seven is a site or plot plan illustrating the proposed event layout, and it lists fourteen things that must appear on it: existing site conditions and features, event parking including handicap, vehicular and pedestrian access points, how vehicular traffic will be separated from pedestrians, portable toilets including handicap, run, ride and walk routes, parade routes, fire extinguishers, tables and chairs, amusement rides, and exit, banner and traffic signs.

Two of the fourteen are worth isolating.

The plan must show the number and location of Town Police and Fire/EMS personnel. The applicant draws the municipal deployment onto its own layout and submits it for the chiefs to approve or revise — which means a production has to arrive at the ninety-day meeting with a view on crowd management posts, not merely a stage position.

Tents are listed with a documentary requirement attached: two copies of a flame retardant certificate and swatches. Physical fabric samples, submitted with the application, in duplicate certificates. A tent supplier who can produce a certificate by email but not a swatch book has not met the checklist.

And one line governs how temporary power is installed rather than described: the site plan entry for temporary electric carries the parenthetical must be performed by a licensed electrician. It appears on the drawing requirement, not buried in a building code reference, which makes it a condition a plan reviewer can check before the electrical permit is ever applied for.

Item eight closes the vendor question: a list of food vendors and items sold, all meeting Broward County Board of Health requirements, and all vendors must be licensed and have liquor/product liability insurance.

Section 20-3(a) names the director — the town administrator or a designee — as the officer who grants or denies, and then forbids issuance until the following town departments and divisions have approved the application: town administrator or designee, police department, fire department, public works department and the building division. Five approvals, all of them conditions precedent, none of them sequenced in the ordinance.

A denial is appealable and generously so. Section 20-4(g) gives the applicant five days from receipt of certified notice to request a hearing; 20-4(h) sends the appeal to the town council, gives it priority at the next regularly scheduled meeting, and makes it a quasi-judicial item with sworn testimony and evidence; 20-4(i) makes the hearing de novo, or as if by original jurisdiction. If an attorney will appear, a motion to appear is filed with the town attorney's office no less than five days beforehand.

The two decisions most likely to change a production's budget are outside all of that. Section 20-9(a) lets the chief of police determine whether and to what extent additional police protection is necessary, on stated criteria — size, location, duration, time and date, expected alcohol service, the number of streets and intersections blocked, the need to detour citizen travel — with the express protection that the speech content of the event shall not be a factor. It closes: the decision of the police chief shall be final. Section 20-10(d) closes the same way for the fire chief, who also approves or denies every fireworks display.

So the permit itself can be relitigated in front of the council under oath, and the staffing level that drives its cost cannot be relitigated at all.

Section 20-9(a) also writes down the remedy the ordinance expects first, and it is not payment: if additional police protection is deemed necessary, the applicant is free to request another time, date and/or location. Only if the applicant wishes to proceed as requested does the permit issue on agreement to pay for the additional service. Events conducted solely for public issue speech protected by the First Amendment pay nothing for police protection at all.

Davie's sound limits are set by receiving land use in a table at section 15-4, measured at the boundary of the receiving land use, as a level exceeded for more than fifty percent of a measurement period of not less than ten minutes, and only where the source sits on some other property. A median over ten minutes, in other words, rather than a peak.

The table reads as follows.

Agricultural — 55 dBA from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., 50 dBA from 7:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. Davie is the only municipality covered on this site that carries an agricultural receiving row at all, and its protected day begins an hour earlier than everybody else's, at six rather than seven. In a town whose land pattern is still partly agricultural and equestrian, that row is not decorative.

Residential and Residential Office — 55 dBA from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., 50 dBA from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.

Office/Business — 60 dBA at all times. Industrial and Utilities — 65 dBA at all times.

Community Facilities, Recreation/Open Space and Commercial Recreation — 60 dBA from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., 55 dBA from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.

The residential boundary at seven in the evening is the fact that reorganises a Davie show. On most of this coast the protected night begins at ten or eleven and a concert is built to end into it. Here the residential limit drops to its night figure of 50 dBA before the support act has finished — three hours before a park curfew elsewhere would bite, and at the hour an outdoor audience is arriving rather than leaving. A show that runs past seven near housing is being measured against the night column for the whole of its main set.

Section 15-5 adds a second geometry on top of the table. It is unlawful to create excessive and unnecessary loud noise on any street or adjacent area within five hundred feet of any hospital, school, institution of learning, public park, church or court room during the period of use, where the noise interferes with the facility or disturbs the persons using it — with the unusual proviso that there is no conviction under this provision unless warning signs are posted on the streets approaching the facility. The protection is real, and it is conditioned on the town's own signage.

Section 15-7 declares specific acts unlawful notwithstanding the noise levels set forth in section 15-4 — so these prohibitions bind whether or not the table is being met. Two reach an outdoor concert directly, and the difference between them is the whole question.

Section 15-7(1)(a) covers any radio, television, phonograph, drum, musical instrument, sound amplifier or similar device which produces, reproduces or amplifies sound, operated between 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. so as to create a noise disturbance across a real property boundary or within a noise sensitive zone — except for activities open to the public and for which a permit has been issued by the Town of Davie.

Section 15-7(2)(a) covers any loudspeaker, public address system or similar device, used or operated for any purpose between 8:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., such that the sound creates a noise disturbance across a residential real property boundary or within a noise sensitive zone on a public right-of-way or public space. No permit exception appears in it.

Read the two together and the structure is specific to this town. The earlier clock, at seven, is the one a permitted public event is lifted out of. The later clock, at eight, is the one written without a carve-out — and it is the clause whose subject matter is a PA system, which is to say the subject matter of an outdoor concert. The exemption the town grants is attached to the instrument and the amplifier; the hard hour is attached to the loudspeaker.

How far that distinction is pressed in practice is a question for the director who writes the permit conditions, and section 20-4 and the checklist's item (e) both give that director the power to fix the hours of operation and the level of amplified music as conditions of the permit itself. The honest reading is that the condition on the permit, not the ordinance, is where a Davie show's end time is actually settled — and that a production which has not read section 15-7(2)(a) before the ninety-day meeting will not know what it is negotiating against.

One further asymmetry sits in the same section. Section 15-8 exempts the unamplified human voice from the chapter at any time, and exempts noise from noncommercial public speaking and public assembly activities conducted on any public space or public right-of-way pursuant to lawful authority. Speech is protected; amplification of it is the regulated act.

Section 15-6 is one sentence: for any source of sound which emits a pure tone, the sound level limits set forth in section 15-4 shall be reduced by five dBA. Every row of the table moves down the moment a source on site is tonal — residential day to 50, residential night to 45, the recreation tier to 55 and 50.

Four municipalities in this county now write rules about the character of a sound and not only its level, and they picked four different instruments to do it with. Two of them work on the spectrum: one by refusing to let the C-weighted figure sit above the A-weighted one at any tier, the other by naming individual unweighted octave bands and putting 63 Hz among them. The remaining two, Davie included, simply subtract five decibels the moment a tone is present, wherever in the spectrum it sits. That last instrument is the crudest of the four and by some distance the easiest to trip, because nothing about a tone's frequency, level or duration qualifies it.

What trips it on a show site is rarely the programme. It is the generator, the air handling and chiller plant, a transformer, a pump, and the alignment sweep — continuous sources that run through build, show and strike, and that sit on the site long before and long after the audience. Section 15-7(9) is aimed at exactly that family: machinery including air conditioning and air-handling equipment operated so as to cause a noise disturbance at any time, with no hour attached.

Section 15-7(7) governs vibration, and it does it without a number. It is unlawful to operate any device creating vibration above the vibration perception threshold of an individual at or beyond the property of the source if on private property, or at fifty feet from the source in a public space. The chapter then defines the threshold as the minimum ground or structure-borne vibrational motion necessary to cause a normal person to be aware of the vibration by such direct means as, but not limited to, sensation by touch or visual observation of moving objects.

A standard written as perception rather than as a figure cannot be designed to with a meter. It can only be designed away from: subwoofer coupling to a slab or a stage deck, the distance from that deck to the property line, and whether the array is ground-stacked on structure that transmits.

Section 15-8 lists the exemptions from section 15-3. Nine of them are the familiar ones: motor vehicles on a right-of-way, the unamplified human voice, federally pre-empted products and interstate carriers, aircraft movement, routine public utility maintenance, emergency alerting and emergency work, emergency-use engines and generators, lawful noncommercial public speech — and, characteristically for this town, nonstationary farming equipment.

The tenth is not familiar at all. It exempts any noise generated by a town-sanctioned event at the Bergeron Rodeo Grounds of Davie, Florida, including the rodeo arena facility located adjacent to Town Hall. It entered the code by Ordinance No. 97-11 in February 1997, nine years after the chapter itself.

A named venue carved out of a municipal noise ordinance is rare, and no other city covered on this site has one. What it means in production terms is specific and narrow. The exemption attaches to the event, not to the address: the qualifier is town-sanctioned, and whether an event is town-sanctioned is a question answered upstream, by the council and the director, not by booking the room. A commercially promoted show on the same ground without that sanction is back inside Table 1 and inside section 15-7 along with everything else.

The grounds themselves are the largest event ground in the town. The Town of Davie publishes them as a 72,000 square foot indoor/outdoor venue with a 4,000 maximum bleacher seating capacity, used for horse shows, dog shows, car shows, air boat shows, specialty and industrial shows, and booked through the town with off-street shuttle parking available. The town's own rental schedule for the site lists an early move-in option, a refundable security deposit, restroom attendants, security guards and a portable stage — which tells a production what the building does not assume you bring, and what the move-in day is treated as.

The second room of any scale is at Nova Southeastern University. Rick Case Arena at the Don Taft University Center is published by the university as a 4,500-seat venue opened in 2006 inside a 366,000 square foot multi-use facility, with over 1,000 permanent chair-back seats on the main level and over 3,000 automated telescopic chair-back seats on the upper level when fully extended, plus 66 club seats. The arena's own venue page adds four locker and dressing rooms, two multipurpose rooms with data and phone hookups, three concession stands and four day-of-show box office windows. Telescopic upper seating is the detail that matters to a touring production, because the floor configuration and the sightline cut are decided by how far that tier is run out, and that is a building decision taken before the rig is hung.

Neither building publishes a grid height, a rigging capacity, a dock count or a service size, and none has been estimated here.

Most cities of this size offer one relief valve from the noise limits and a production learns to price it. Davie's is section 15-11, and the first thing it says is how narrow it is: the town shall have the authority, consistent with this section, to grant special variances which may be requested pursuant to sections 15-7(8) and 15-7(14). Those two subsections are domestic power tools and idling vehicles. Amplified music is not among them.

The code is not wholly consistent on the point, and a production should know that before it relies on either reading. Section 15-7(12), which governs construction, requires that work be done without a special variance as provided for in section 15-11 outside permitted hours — so the construction clause plainly contemplates a variance that section 15-11(a) does not list. Section 15-7(12)(c) in turn cross-refers domestic power tools to section 15-7(10) rather than 15-7(8). The subsection numbering has drifted across amendments. What survives both readings is that nothing in chapter 15 offers a variance for a concert's amplified sound, and that the route to a later or louder show runs through the permit conditions under chapter 20 rather than through a noise variance.

Where a variance is available, the process is public in a way an event schedule has to absorb. The application goes to the department of development services and must demonstrate that compliance would constitute unreasonable hardship on the applicant, on the community or on other persons; any person claiming to be adversely affected may file a statement against it; and the director must place the decision and the reasons for it on public file.

Then it is advertised. Not less than seven days before granting or denying, the department mails notice to every property owner within five hundred feet of the boundary of the property from which the noise will originate, and the town posts a sign on each street frontage of that land, also at least seven days out. Both happen before the decision, not after it, which means the neighbours are canvassed on a request that may yet be refused.

Three mechanical details complete it. A granted variance carries a time limit on the permitted activity and does not take effect until every condition is agreed by the applicant; noncompliance with any condition terminates it. Section 15-12 requires the permit to be physically affixed to the machine or equipment, or, where that is impossible, mounted visibly within twenty-five feet of it. And section 15-13 makes it non-transferable — from one location to another, from one piece of equipment to another, or from one person to another. Swapping a generator set on the morning of the show voids the paper that covered it.

Section 15-7(12) makes it unlawful to engage in construction work without a special variance in two circumstances. Its list of regulated activity is long and it names hoisting alongside excavating, grading, pile driving, pneumatic hammering, demolition and dredging, and it reaches alteration or repair of any structure or upon any site for the same:

Between 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., and at all times on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, where the sound exceeds 50 dBA at a real property boundary; and at any other time where it exceeds 80 dBA at a real property boundary for the daily period of operation.

Hoisting is named in the list. A ground-support build, a motor-driven roof lift, a scaffold deck or a stage erection on a site is work upon any site for a structure, and the clause does not exempt temporary structures. The weekday headroom is wide — 80 dBA at the line is a workable build. The weekend is the problem: Saturday, Sunday and holidays are governed by the 50 dBA figure at all hours, with no daytime allowance at all, and most festival load-ins happen on exactly those days.

Section 15-7(4) covers the quieter end of the same work. Loading, unloading, opening, closing or other handling of boxes, crates, containers, building materials, garbage cans or similar objects between 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. in such a manner as to cause a noise disturbance across a residential boundary or in a noise sensitive zone is prohibited outright — no decibel figure, no permit exception written into it. An overnight strike beside housing is reached by this clause whether or not a meter would show anything.

Section 15-7(14) is the strictest idling rule on this site. It is unlawful to operate the motor of a vehicle over eight thousand pounds for longer than two consecutive minutes while standing on private property within one hundred fifty feet of residentially zoned and occupied land, unless it stands inside a completely enclosed structure. Plantation's equivalent allows five minutes at the same weight and the same setback; Davie allows two. Emergency and public transportation vehicles are exempt, and delivery vehicles are exempt where the motor is an integral component of the delivery process — which covers a tail lift or a PTO pump under load, and does not cover an engine left running for the cab.

Section 15-9 is the backstop behind all of it: the chapter states that a violation may occur even where no measurement was taken. Where measurements are taken, section 15-10 requires the observation period to be determined by the character of the noise and the instrument, in accordance with ANSI S1.13.

Section 20-14(a) opens: the following prohibitions shall apply to all persons participating in any special event. Ten subsections follow. They are plainly drawn from the civil-disturbance ordinances of the period, and section 20-14(c)(2) states the purpose as prohibiting items that have the potential to be used as weapons. Several of them nonetheless describe ordinary production stock.

(4) makes it unlawful to carry or possess any length of metal, PVC, plastic or other similar hard or stiff material, whether hollow or solid. That sentence has no size, no quantity and no purpose qualifier in it.

(2) permits signs, posters, plaques and notices only where constructed solely of cloth, paper or cardboard no greater than one-quarter inch in thickness. (3) requires any length of lumber, wood or wood lath to be blunt at both ends, with a round or flat edge, excepting only puppet supports that stay attached to the puppet, and stilts not exceeding fifteen feet in length and two inches by two inches in width. (5) bans glass bottles, jars and containers of any kind other than a medication vial. (6) allows balloons filled only with air, oxygen or helium. (9) bans projectile launchers and devices commonly used for launching, hurling, spraying or throwing any object, liquid or material. (10) bans the sleeping dragon — a term the chapter defines at section 20-2 as a section of pipe or weighted container with handcuffs, chains, carabiners or other locking devices used to lock persons to each other or to objects, and one of the more unexpected definitions to find in an event ordinance.

The exceptions in subsection (b) are two, and neither is the permit holder. They cover a disabled or injured person's wheelchair, cane or walker, and the performance of a military, police, fire or similar governmental or military honour guard. There is no exemption in the section for the applicant, its authorised representative, its contractors or its crew.

The sensible reading is that a special event permit, its approved site plan and the building permits for the structures on it are what authorise the equipment those structures are made of, and that section 20-14 is aimed at what attendees bring through a gate. That reading is not written into the section. It is worth settling explicitly with the director at the ninety-day meeting, in writing, for any build whose crowd-facing elements are steel, aluminium or PVC — barrier, deck, truss, fencing, stanchions, pipe and drape — because section 20-15(e) resolves conflicts between chapter 20 and any other ordinance in favour of the more stringent standard, and the glass prohibition alone changes what a bar service can pour into.