LOS ANGELES – To get more people to visit, a well-known business area in Southern California is copying ideas from Bourbon Street and the Las Vegas Strip.
The Santa Monica City Council passed an ordinance that lets people drink alcohol along the Third Street Promenade as long as they got it from a business in the area.
The early hours of May 14 saw the vote on the law, which made a new entertainment zone that runs for three blocks from Wilshire Boulevard to Broadway. The promenade is only for people on foot; cars have not been able to use it for a long time.
Caroline Torosis, the Pro Tem Mayor of Santa Monica, said that the entertainment zone is an effort to bring life back to an area that has been struggling since the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the more than eight-hour meeting, Torosis said, “We’re trying to bring fun, joy, and vibrancy back to the Promenade, and we’re trying to revitalize our downtown core.”
During public comment before the ruling, people in the area raised concerns about safety and people being drunk in public.
“If you have no control over the homeless, by not providing the city with enough police, how will this action create more control over those issues?” A resident named Denise Barton said something at the meeting.
Local business owners backed the action, saying that the promenade needs to give more than one thing in order to stay open.
At the meeting, Motty Miranda, a resident and business owner, said, “Everything you’ve seen on the promenade that has opened in the last six months has been mostly entertainment and interactive.” “When you run these kinds of businesses, you can only take a certain number of reservations, and in Santa Monica, you need alcohol to pay the rent and make money.”
The entertainment zone rollout was restricted, but there are plans to make it bigger.
At first, the leisure zone will only be in place from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Friday through Sunday.
The ordinance goes into effect right away, but a city staff report says that the rollout needs to include security and operational safeguards for the city and businesses, such as the right signage and alcohol safety training for businesses that are taking part, before the “regular activation” of the zone can start.
So that the walkway is covered during the week from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., the council told staff to make the zone bigger as soon as possible.
The law says that shoppers can’t bring their own booze to the promenade. Instead, businesses have to give out wristbands that customers can use to prove that they bought drinks in the entertainment zone. Shops will not be able to serve drinks.
A report from the city staff says that 13 businesses on the promenade are allowed to serve alcohol.
The city thinks the entertainment zone will be open for business for the first time on June 21, which is also the date of the city’s Pride on the Promenade event.
After a new rule was passed, this was the first entertainment zone outside of San Francisco.
After California Senate Bill 969 was passed in September 2024, the Third Street Promenade entertainment zone is the first in the area.
After previous legislation gave the city and county of San Francisco the power to do so, the bill gave local governments across the whole state the same power to form entertainment zones.
San Francisco shows four entertainment zones across the city on its website, and Mission Local reported that Mayor Daniel Lurie announced legislation to add five more in April.