Venue owners to city of Buffalo: We are not amused by your ‘amusement fee’

Citing obscure law, City attempts cash-grab at music community's expense

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In 2023, Visit Buffalo Niagara was awarded a grant earmarked for its initiative to transform Buffalo into a healthy music city, one that would draw music-loving tourists and their dollars to town, thereby acting as a rising tide that might lift all ships. 

Last week, the City of Buffalo sent letters targeting many of the region’s most prominent music venues, ‘reminding’ them that they were required by the long-dormant Buffalo City Code Chapter 75 to pay a per-show fee to offer live music to the masses via ticketed shows. 

Resounding beneath this cacophonous cluster is a tale of two cities - one populated by folks that value their own culture, and one full of people who clearly wouldn’t recognize that culture if it crawled out of one of the city’s innumerable potholes and bit them on the butt. 

As reported by Investigative Post, and hilariously parodied by the blog of Buffalo attorney Stephanie Adams, this elaborate faux pas executed with a bewildering lack of clarity by the city could cost already struggling independent music venues tens of thousands of dollars a year, to say nothing of clogging up their schedules with redundant visits to City Hall to chase down individual ‘Amusement Licenses’ for each of their shows. 

It’s no secret that the City of Buffalo has long grossly overestimated its revenue sources, thereby creating reoccurring budget shortfalls that even this year’s 9% tax hike won’t likely rectify. The City needs money. That may or may not be understandable. What is clearly difficult to chew on, let alone swallow, is the fact that the City is attempting to go after long-suffering music venues for some of that money. 

Anyone who works in and around the Buffalo music scene knows that the profit margins for these venues are somewhere between minuscule and microscopic. This sloppily executed attempted money-grab would eat up those slim profits, and could well put some of these venues out of business. 

Responding to the less-than-amused cries of many of these venue owners, Jonathan D. Rivera, Assembly member for New York State’s 149th Assembly District representing parts of the cities of Buffalo and Lackawanna, and Senator Sean Ryan, 61st district and Chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Economic Development and Small Business, held a press conference at the Sportsmen’s Tavern on Amherst Street in Buffalo. Sportsmen’s proprietor Dwane Hall, Scot Fisher and Anna Kapechuk of Asbury Hall/the 9th Ward, and Buffalo RiverWorks GM Bill Casale represented a group of venues that also includes Buffalo Iron Works, the Town Ballroom, and others. 

Rivera didn’t mince words. 

“We’ve had a bad weather week in Buffalo,” he began. 

“It’s been turbulent, it’s been messy, and it’s threatened to devastate our neighborhoods. And we can say the same thing about our city’s financial situation. Why else would we be standing here today with small business owners who were blindsided last week with a letter from the city informing them that they would soon have to pay an ‘amusement fee’ for their venues?

“The proposal for the levy is an onerous burden that would add thousands of dollars to each venue’s bottom line and costs that would be passed on to consumers, and ultimately, drive them away. We have to ask ourselves: ‘Is this how we support our city’s cultural scene? Is this how we reward hard-working small business owners who are still trying to regain their footing, post-Covid?”

Asbury Hall’s Fisher lamented what he called the City’s wrong-headed approach toward balancing its financial shortfalls. “I have an idea of how to help Buffalo - find a way to raise the city’s population from 280,000 to 380,000 people by making it a friendlier place to live and enjoy the culture, instead of simply nickel-and-diming that culture toward the brink of extinction.” Well, yes. Most of us hold these truths to be self-evident. 

The City has paused its effort to collect on what Rivera called ‘onerous’ fees related to the old and rather mildewy sections of the Buffalo City Code.

But both Rivera and Ryan insist that a pause isn’t good enough. They vowed to fight side by side with our community of music venues to make this cessation permanent.

As well they should.