On September 14, 2026, the Norman City Council held a work session to discuss two primary agenda items: revisions to noise variance and special event permitting for large fraternity/sorority concerts, and updates from the Social Services Division on homelessness initiatives. The meeting included presentations from police staff and social services personnel, followed by council deliberation.
Oh, you've been doing a great job of getting information out to the police department and others about what other events are taking place uh with the paternities and sororities, just like the regular date parties and where they're gonna be, if they're gonna be at Logis, or if they're gonna have a date party of it, Yo Pablo's, or if it's mom's weekend and did they want to have something on special for mom's weekend? Um they are doing a really they are working hard and really gathering that information and disseminating it out. But so I think this is a big issue. Um and Denny's going to show you some numbers in a minute. There's not 300 kids there. There's not two five hundred kids or people. There's actually there's two or three thousand that are coming to these uh concerts. Uh there was a Instagram or something, uh TikTok or whatever picture of a video I saw. I I mean they're just packed in there, and they all have their little phones with the lights on and set a concert, and it's a professional production. Uh it's not they always put together a little stage, and somebody that is hired and they bring in and they book these these concerts. And so, you know, not much on this slide. What can we do? Do we want to amend the special event and lower the threshold of people numbers if they can attend and then really because we kind of we knew there was gonna be more than almost a thousand, we were like, you have to do a special event, and they complied without any complaints, or or do we want to only say, well, all these large scale events should just be a commercially zoned area like our Norman Music Festival? Well, that's like we get complaints about that, but it's in a commercial area. You know, it's maybe that is a way to go that we can only do that. So it's open for discussion. When when you do a special event, uh you know, which if I'm having sorry, I have a number to be clear on things, so I managed to copy some box. And so I'm thinking, okay, I gotta go and keep this. It's it's like $25. So if it's a big event, it's not a deposit, it's a theme. We keep the money. Right. If I have a I have a five hundred people, I'm protecting all the people, I have exited that by far. But I think, hey, yeah, I'm gonna have this big name out. Why wouldn't the city charge a higher deposit associate with it for a cost? If there's cost or incur cost for the event, then the deposit is that. Some of it can be paid for venue fee. I mean like a venue fee, basically. Well, it's returnable if it's your events within line. And there's shut down. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, watching pause. Waiting at your home in your neighborhood, and you have a hundred people, you really need to get a variance of always there. It's just gonna be loud either way. Uh we have to have people, we get people, don't we, that give personal that happens is just not the fraternities that are getting experiences. To me, depending on the size of the activity, one is that kick in scheme. Whether it's a security or money. If I'm playing a constant house. Okay, no problem. Here it's your whatever it's five thousand or ten thousand. I'll stay within the rules. I mean, that's much mean. That's my contract in the city, right? If I don't, then okay, they they had to respawn, they had to put it in once and they said fire and there is my positive. And that was one of council member grant's concerns too, was the amount of our fees and fine. Yeah, they're charging municipal court, there is a rate of $50 to $750 if you get charged, if you leave guilty or get down guilty, but fees $25 is like a pretty good deal. Yeah, I was gonna say um Bob actually said because he was getting variances at one point before he got the spud change. But uh just that somebody who bought them regularly and I've heard from others that they don't mind if it goes up because it hasn't gone up in a decade and I think about staff time for reviewing all this stuff and enforcing and I I don't think it would be inappropriate to raise that. I also think that to be more transparent with the neighborhood because it does say in the permit whether people do it or not is another thing but you're supposed to notice your neighbors so even if they don't notice them I think it could be possible for us to notice the public that there is a special uh a noise variance permit that was issued um I know we do it for like zoning stuff where it's like oh voters have gone out but um I don't know what you need to look at I think it's really dude the host so if I was a city and you're a host and you didn't notify your neighbors that'd be part of the deposit and say confirm. Well we always talked about like raising the permit fee and then an escalation of fees like if you came back um and you had straight outside the variance that you could either a not be granted it for a while or if you were granted it again and it had been a while it was still like a higher fee just to reiterate that this is a special thing you're getting and if you're not going to operate within the bounds of it it just continues to grow.