Event production in Miramar
concerts, festivals and municipal builds

Most municipalities answer a visiting production's first two questions in one document. Miramar answers them in four, and the four do not cross-reference each other.

The first is the temporary use permit at Section 322 of the Land Development Code, administered by the community development department. The second is Chapter 11, Article III of the Code of Ordinances, which governs a circus, a carnival or any other exhibition for public assemblage and routes it back to the land use regulations. The third is Section 14-4 of the parks chapter, which lists fifteen activities needing a permit from the Parks and Recreation Department. The fourth is not in the Code at all: the city publishes a special event application package that is submitted to the Miramar Fire Department and reviewed by zoning, fire, electrical, plumbing and structural desks.

Read all four together and the absence is the first real finding. None of them states how many days before the event an application is due. There is no sixty-day rule, no ninety-day rule, no tier by attendance and no processing promise. The fire department package carries no deadline, no attendance threshold, no insurance limit and no condition about sound. The land development code sets a maximum duration for a permit but no minimum notice for applying for one.

What replaces the date is the route. Below a certain headcount a concert is an administrative approval across a counter. At or above it the same concert is a resolution of the city commission, and a commission works to an agenda rather than to a lead time. The schedule a production has to build backwards from is a meeting calendar, and which calendar it is depends on a single number described in section 06.

Miramar's noise provisions are Article VI of Chapter 10, which is the chapter on health, sanitation and nuisances. The article runs from Section 10-111 to Section 10-117 and it is qualitative from end to end. There is no sound pressure level anywhere in it, no A-weighted or C-weighted quantity, no percentile, no observation period, no meter specification and no table by zoning district.

The operative standard is Section 10-115, which prohibits the creation of any unreasonably loud, disturbing and unnecessary noise, and prohibits noise of such character, intensity and duration as to be detrimental to the life or health of any individual or in the disturbance of the public peace and welfare. Section 10-116 then declares eight categories of act to be loud, disturbing and unnecessary, and says expressly that the list is not exclusive. Three of the eight carry clock times — locomotive whistles after ten at night, and the playing of a radio, television, phonograph or musical instrument and the raising of voices in the street, both flagged particularly between eleven at night and seven in the morning — but each is tied to annoying or disturbing a person rather than to a figure.

For a design engineer this inverts the usual exercise. There is no number to predict at a property line, so there is nothing to demonstrate compliance against in advance and no measurement a production can take on site that proves it is inside the rule. What the article gives instead is three specific, checkable constraints on when and how far sound may travel, and they are the subjects of the next three sections.

Section 10-112 makes it unlawful, without a permit from the city manager or an authorised designee, to maintain and operate any radio or other mechanical musical instrument or device whose sound is cast directly upon public streets and places, where it is operated for advertising purposes or to attract the passing public, or where it is so placed and operated that the sound can be heard to the annoyance and inconvenience of travellers on any street or public place or of people in neighbouring premises.

Then the proviso, and it is the only distance in the whole article: between 11:30 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. and between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., such devices may be operated so that the sound is heard not more than three hundred feet away.

Thirteen cities on this site publish a plainly-audible distance. Each attaches it to a time of day, a land use or a source type — twenty-five feet at any hour, fifty feet in a park, a hundred feet from a building. Miramar is the only one that attaches its distance to a lunch hour and an evening meal, which together come to four and a half hours out of twenty-four.

The arithmetic matters because of where the windows sit rather than how wide they are. A show that loads in during the morning, sound checks in the early afternoon and performs in the evening crosses the gap between the two windows on its way to the second. The checkable question a site visit should answer is not whether the programme is loud, but which part of the day each noisy element of it falls into.

Section 10-114(a) prohibits performing labour or work, or operating or conducting any business or enterprise, within one thousand feet of inhabited dwellings, apartments or hotels if the noise emitted disturbs or is detrimental to the health, peace and quiet of surrounding residents. The section then carves out its own exception: it does not apply to businesses operating between 7:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. on weekdays, which are defined in the section as Monday through Friday.

Read in that order, the consequence is plain and it is the inverse of how most codes are built. On a Tuesday a build has eleven hours of unconditional headroom. On a Saturday and a Sunday the carve-out is simply not available, and the only question left is whether the work disturbs surrounding residents — a question with no number attached to it and no hour of the day that answers it.

Note also what the radius is drawn around. It is not a zoning district and not a receiving land use; it is inhabited dwellings, apartments or hotels, so the test follows occupancy rather than the map. In a city whose western half is almost entirely residential subdivision, a thousand feet reaches a long way from most open ground.

Section 10-114(b) is the relief, and its limit is the useful part. Application may be made to the city manager or an authorised designee, who may issue a permit authorising a business to operate during the prohibited hours for a period not to exceed thirty days. Relief here is a window, not a status, and a run of weekend dates spread across a season is not one permit.

Section 10-113 is headed, in the Code's own words, with the hours noisy outdoor amusements must close. It makes it unlawful for the owner of, or any person employed at, any place where an outdoor amusement is operated to operate or conduct that business between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. where noise emitting from it disturbs the peace and quiet of the inhabitants or occupants of any occupied building.

Of the three clocks in this article, this is the one an outdoor programme is measured by, and it is the only provision in the Code addressed to outdoor amusement as a category. Ten at night is also where the majority of this region lands, so the hour itself is unremarkable. What is unusual is that it is not a permitted-event clock: nothing in Article VI allows a permit to move it, and nothing in Section 322 of the Land Development Code purports to.

Then Section 10-117, which disapplies Sections 10-115 and 10-116 to three things: a city vehicle engaged in necessary public business; night-time excavation or repair of bridges, streets or highways by or for the city, county or state where the public welfare makes daytime work impossible; and — the one that matters here — the reasonable use of amplifiers or loudspeakers in the course of public addresses which are noncommercial in character.

That is a distinction drawn on the content and purpose of the speech rather than on its level. Two identical loudspeakers at identical settings on identical ground fall on opposite sides of it, and the thing that separates them is whether the address is commercial. Hollywood's ordinance runs the other way, forbidding a refusal grounded in what the sound will say, and Davie carries an equivalent safeguard inside its police-staffing clause. Miramar's exemption, by contrast, is available precisely because of what the sound is for.

Section 322 of the Land Development Code is the instrument that actually permits an event, and Table 8 inside it is the part worth reading twice. The table lists sixteen kinds of temporary use down the side. Across the top it sets two headcount columns — events with less than one thousand in expected attendance, and events with more than one thousand — and three approval routes: administrative approval, approval by the Development Review Committee, and approval by the city commission.

Festival, Concert and Musical Events is its own row. Below a thousand expected attendees it is an administrative approval issued by the department. At more than a thousand it goes to Section 322.2.3: the application is transmitted to the city manager, who schedules it for review by the city commission, and the commission may approve it by resolution and may impose reasonable conditions as necessary to ensure public safety and welfare, including the duration of the permit.

Three other rows are worth knowing because they break the pattern. Fireworks displays and shows carry one mark only, in the commission column, so there is no administrative route to a pyrotechnic display at any size at all. Car Show and Sales likewise has no administrative route, taking the Development Review Committee below a thousand and the commission above it. Carnival, Fairs and Circuses is administrative below a thousand and commission above, and the table's own footnote adds that a carnival, fair, circus or other outdoor event above a thousand attendees on non-city property is subject to Development Review Committee review prior to commission approval — two bodies in sequence for one permit.

The floor is set by another footnote: outdoor events, sales and services on non-city-owned property anticipated to have at least fifty and fewer than a thousand attendees at any given time, other than a private social event held wholly within residentially zoned property. Fifty people is where the instrument starts.

One further line in Section 322.2 is easy to miss and changes how the commission route feels: notice and public hearing requirements do not apply to temporary use permits. So an event above the threshold is decided by an elected body in a published meeting, but without the advertised notice and hearing that a land use application of comparable visibility would carry.

Section 11-61 makes it unlawful to conduct a circus, a carnival or other exhibition for public assemblage in the city without first applying to the community development department and obtaining a temporary use permit under the land use regulations. That much is routing. The two sections after it are substantive.

Section 11-62 provides that permission under the article shall be given only to organisations which have been in existence for a period of three or more years and which are engaged in charitable, civic, community, benevolent, religious or scholastic works or similar activities within the city. Section 11-63 then requires an applying organisation to furnish proof that it is a nonprofit organisation complying with Section 11-62.

Taken at face value, those two sections mean a commercial promoter cannot be the applicant for a circus, a carnival or an exhibition for public assemblage in Miramar, however the event is financed and whoever is actually producing it. The organisation holding the permit has to be a nonprofit, and it has to have existed for three years before it can hold one.

This is the sharpest contrast on the site. Hialeah's special events article sweeps charities and nonprofits into its definition of a commercial event alongside every other organiser once fifty people are expected, so being a charity there has no bearing at all on which route an application takes. Miramar runs the other way entirely: for this class of event, charitable status is not one route among several, it is the only one. And the preference is not isolated. Section 322.2 of the Land Development Code exempts every organisation qualifying as tax-exempt under section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code from paying the temporary use permit fee, and Section 14-9 of the parks chapter lets the city commission establish policies for city sponsorship of private nonprofit youth-serving sports organisations and for their use of the parks.

For a production company the practical reading is about who signs, not about who works. The questions that decide whether a carnival or exhibition can happen at all are whether a qualifying organisation is presenting it and how long that organisation has existed — and those are answered before any drawing is worth making.

Section 322.6 sets general criteria, and two of them are hard limits rather than standards.

Section 322.6.3 provides that an applicant may receive a temporary use permit on the same property not more than once every thirty days, unless approved by the city manager or the manager's designee. Three uses are excepted by name and none of them is an event: a farmers' market may be permitted weekly if the permit is renewed annually, a sidewalk or parking lot sale by a city-licensed business may be permitted on a bi-monthly basis, and mobile produce vending may be permitted weekly on an annually renewed permit.

Frequency caps appear in several codes in this county and each is attached to something different. Pompano Beach counts events against the acreage of the site. Sunrise allows six per calendar year at any one location and treats a commercial plaza as a single location. Deerfield Beach caps three per calendar year per organiser with ninety days between them. Hialeah makes the required gap twice the length of the event. Miramar's version is the plainest of the five and the shortest: thirty days, keyed to the applicant and the property together, with the city manager as the only route through it.

Section 322.6.1 is the one that decides where a show can be at all. The temporary use must be compatible with surrounding land uses — and then, in the same sentence, temporary use permits shall not be issued in developed single-family residential areas, except for community garage sales. That is not a setback to be measured or a condition to be satisfied; it is an exclusion by the character of the surrounding development, and in a city built largely of single-family subdivision it removes a great deal of otherwise open ground from consideration before anything else is discussed.

Section 322.6.2 adds the parking test: a parking problem must not be created, and if off-site parking is used, written permission is needed from that property's owner, who must demonstrate that the temporary use does not cause the loss of legally required parking spaces for their own site. The neighbouring landowner's own code compliance, not merely their goodwill, is part of the submission.

Finally, Section 322.4 gives the city manager power of immediate revocation where a temporary use or structure becomes a nuisance, violates the conditions of the permit, or endangers the public health, aesthetics or safety. Aesthetics sits in that list between public health and safety as a ground for stopping a permitted event, and the section attaches no standard to it.

Section 322.1 requires that temporary structures and uses conform to the fire safety, means of egress, accessibility, light, ventilation and sanitary requirements of the Land Development Code and of FBC Building Section 3103, as found by the building official to be necessary to ensure public health, safety and general welfare. That is a current Florida Building Code section cited by number, and Section 3103 is the chapter 31 provision that governs temporary structures — which makes it the clause a tent, a stage roof or a scaffold tower is actually assessed under.

Now read Section 9-51, the adoption clause of the fire prevention article. It adopts the 1988 edition of the South Florida Fire Prevention Code, Broward County Edition, being chapter 52 of the South Florida Building Code, Broward County Edition. Subsection (b) then adopts, by reference, the South Florida Building Code, 1988, Broward County Edition and any future editions thereof, together with all NFPA codes adopted by that code, naming in particular NFPA 101 Life Safety Code and NFPA 1124, the fireworks manufacture, transportation and storage code. The section directs that wherever those codes use the words municipality or authority having jurisdiction, they are to be held to mean the city.

The South Florida Building Code was superseded as a building code when the Florida Building Code took statewide effect in 2002. So one instrument in this city points a temporary structure at a current code section and another points the same structure's fire provisions at a 1988 code and whatever its future editions turned out to be. Neither has been repealed in favour of the other, and nothing in either tells a reader which governs.

This is worth raising early rather than discovering at inspection, and it is a narrow question with a short answer: which code edition is the fire marshal applying to this stage, this tent and this means of egress. The useful detail is that the city's published special event application package already routes the submission to the fire department and runs it past electrical, plumbing and structural reviewers, so the person who answers the question is on the distribution list from the start.

Section 14-4 of the parks chapter opens generously: except as provided in the section, city parks and recreation centres may be used by the public without a permit for recreational purposes. Then subsection (3) lists fifteen activities for which a permit is required, from the Parks and Recreation Department, and the list is not written around crowd size.

One item is the familiar headcount trigger — paragraph (f), any event, meeting, activity, gathering or group of persons having a common purpose, design or goal upon any public facility, public right-of-way or public park attended by or anticipated to be attended by fifty or more persons. Three others are the build:

Paragraph (g): use of any electrical or electronic device or equipment that would require outdoor auxiliary power. Paragraph (j): construction or erection of a tent, canopy, stand, bandstand, stage or other temporary structure. Paragraph (i): any exhibit, music or dramatic performance, fair, concert, play, radio or television broadcast other than a news transmission, in such a manner that it interferes with the use and enjoyment by another person.

Paragraph (g) is the one with no counterpart elsewhere on this site. Sixteen other cities regulate generators through noise limits, through fuel and flame provisions, or through a site plan that has to show where power comes from. Miramar makes the need for outdoor auxiliary power its own permit trigger, with no threshold of any kind attached. A four-person acoustic set that needs one small generator for a pair of powered speakers is a permitted activity in a Miramar park; so is a film crew running a single lamp off a putt-putt. The crowd could be six.

Paragraph (j) is worth noting for what it names. Several codes in this region regulate tents and leave staging to the building department. This one puts stand, bandstand and stage in the ordinance text alongside tent and canopy, so the deck itself is named rather than inferred.

Around them: paragraph (h) covers the use or display of movies, television or commercial photography, and Section 14-8 adds that such use requires prior written approval from the city and prior payment of the applicable fees. Paragraph (l) covers the sale of food or any edible items, paragraph (n) instructional classes and programmes, and paragraph (o) — the catch-all that is wider than it looks — uses other than the designated or intended function of the facility. Section 14-4(6) then reserves the city's right to require an applicant to enter into an agreement with the city in addition to the permit, so the permit is not necessarily the last document.

And Section 14-7 is the one that catches people out: no animals or pets of any kind are permitted in city parks and recreation centres, except in areas posted for pet use, service animals in a working capacity under the Americans with Disabilities Act — the section states expressly that a companion or therapeutic animal is not a service animal — or upon the prior written approval of the Parks and Recreation Director. An act that travels with an animal needs that written approval, and it is a separate ask from the event permit.

Section 14-2(1) directs that the City Manager or a designee shall develop an administrative procedure for the rules and regulations regarding the hours and use of each city-operated park and recreation centre, and that those rules and regulations are incorporated into the section by reference and made a specific part of it. Section 14-2(2) requires at least one sign posted conspicuously in each park and recreation centre stating the hours of operation and the rules, and requires visitors to comply with what is posted.

So the closing time of a specific park in this city is a legally operative figure that does not appear anywhere in the Code of Ordinances. It is set administratively, per facility, and published on a sign. Hialeah reaches a similar place by requiring hours to be posted in each facility while still printing a default in the Code; Miramar prints no default at all. The practical consequence is that a load-out schedule cannot be checked against an ordinance section — it has to be checked against the procedure for that particular park, and the sign at the gate is the published version of it.

Section 14-2(3) is the part that reaches the strike. When a park or recreation centre is closed, no person shall congregate or loiter on the premises except pursuant to a special event permit issued by the Parks and Recreation Department. There is one route to being lawfully present on park ground after closing, it is that permit, and it is the same department's permit as the one in Section 14-4 rather than a separate after-hours instrument. A build that will still have trucks and crew on site past the posted hour needs that permission to cover the hours it will actually occupy, not only the hours the audience is there.

Section 14-5 sets the conditions that attach to every parks permit. They are issued first come, first served; they are nontransferable and good only on the dates specified; the permittee is responsible for the conduct of the entire group and any invitees; the permittee assumes all risk and is solely answerable in damages for accidents and injury to person or property related to the use; and a security deposit may be required, returned after park personnel inspect and verify that the facility is undamaged and properly cleaned. Non-transferability is worth reading alongside Section 11-62: the organisation that qualifies to hold the permit must be the organisation named on it.

Section 14-6(1) permits alcoholic beverages to be sold in city-operated parks and recreation centres by persons operating under a concession from the City, subject to the regulation and control of the Parks and Recreation Department Director. Three limits follow in the same subsection. Sale shall be by the individual drink only. Individual drinks sold by the concession may be consumed only on the premises of the park or recreation centre in which that concession is located. And the sale of beer and wine in unopened containers or glass bottles is prohibited.

By-the-drink service from the city's own concessionaire is a different proposition from a bar operated by the event, and the premises restriction means a concession in one park does not serve a programme running in another. For an event on park ground, drinks service is effectively a question about which concession holds that facility rather than a question about the production's own licensing.

Section 14-6(2) is the second route, and it contains a defect worth knowing before relying on it. Alcohol may also be consumed at authorised functions in city parks and recreation centres occurring in connection with the rental of the premises, provided the proposed provision and consumption is disclosed and approved by the city pursuant to an agreement with the City, or a temporary use permit approval pursuant to Section 505 of the City's Land Development Code, if applicable.

There is no Section 505 in the Land Development Code. Chapter 5 of that code is organised in four articles, and its first article contains Section 501 followed by Sections 502 and 503, both of which are reserved. The temporary use permit provisions are at Section 322, in Chapter 3. So the cross-reference in the operative alcohol provision points at a section number that the Land Development Code does not use.

This is the same class of defect as Deerfield Beach's community-event exemption, which routes a finish after eleven at night to a section that was vacated when its article was repealed and renumbered. In both cases the provision names a route and the route is not there. The difference is that Miramar's alternative route — an agreement with the City — is in the same sentence and is unaffected, so the practical answer is to ask for the agreement and to treat the temporary use permit limb as needing confirmation of which section is meant.

Miramar operates a municipal cultural centre at 2400 Civic Center Place, and what it publishes about its theatre puts this city in a small group on this site. From the venue's own pages: an 800-seat theatre with orchestra and balcony levels; a stage 35 feet deep by 77 feet wide; a proscenium 45 feet wide by 24 feet high; and a fly gallery 54 feet high. The venue also states that the room has an orchestra pit, private ensemble and principal dressing rooms, a green room, an LED star curtain, projectors and a Blackhawk movie screen.

Those four dimensions describe a real fly house, and that is the comparison worth making. Set them against the rooms this site has already recorded in the cities around it: a 2,381-seat university auditorium in Boca Raton whose own technical pack records neither fly space nor any counterweight system in the house; a 1,471-seat room in Coral Springs with twenty-four line sets of which only six are listed as open; a 296-seat city theatre in Sunrise that publishes no stage dimension at all; Plantation's largest cultural room, closed to the public until further notice; and Deerfield Beach, whose own capital programme records the absence of any municipal performing arts building. Miramar publishes thirty feet of clear height above its proscenium opening.

And now the gap, stated as a gap. The venue's public pages publish no line set count, no batten length, no arbor capacity, no grid height distinct from the gallery figure, no loading dock dimension and no electrical service. They refer to a separate technical specification document reached through the venue's own enquiry process. None of those figures is estimated here, because a fly gallery height without a line set schedule does not tell a production what it can hang, and an inferred arbor capacity is the specific kind of number that gets someone hurt.

That is the honest shape of the room from published sources: a well-specified envelope and an unpublished rig. The first call about a show in it is for the technical specification document and the line set schedule, and the questions worth having written down before that call are in the grid below.