The San Mateo City Council crooned an unpopular tune last night, approving a controversial 45-day emergency moratorium on the creation of small, private rooms for karaoke in restaurants and clubs.
The decision would not affect karaoke in the main room of a restaurant or club, but it may provide a blueprint for part of the city’s upcoming entertainment ordinance, which could ban small-room karaoke altogether.
“This is not about karaoke. This is really about small booth issues,” said police Chief Susan Manheimer, whose department recommended adoption of the ordinance.
Private rooms, she said, have been known to harbor illicit drug use, underage drinking, sexual behavior and prostitution, assault and battery and illegal gambling.
“A person came in reporting a loss of $50,000 in one of these rooms,” she said.
Issues within small rooms can stem both from their secluded nature, where enforcement of safety measures is difficult, and from a lack of “moral imperative” of singers and listeners in private rooms to get along with other audience members, according to one officer.
As it stands now, the moratorium will affect only one restaurant, Fusia, on 3708 S. El Camino Real.
Owners Steven Lin and his mother, Li-Ping Cheng, opened the restaurant in September intending to have four rooms of private karaoke, but were denied the permit, Lin said. He has spent several hundred thousand dollars to renovate and open his restaurant, according to investor Annette Leung. It was only recently, in meeting with police and city officials, that he learned that the city might be moving toward banning the private rooms altogether.
Another restaurant, Aqua Lounge at 401 East Third St., already has private karaoke rooms and will be unaffected by the short-term moratorium. There were many public safety problems there under previous ownership, according to police, but the new owners have been cooperating with police so far.
Still, Capt. Kevin Raffaelli said, in a recent inspection there, police found violations such as locked private room doors and inadequate security.
While to police and city officials the issue is safety, many audience members say private karaoke is a cultural institution and good clean business. As the people spoke, it became clear that singing with friends, which may not be a standard recreational activity with some people, is very important to many Asian Pacific Americans.
“Everyone likes to sing. To share an intimate thing like a party with your family or proposing to your fiancé over a song is not something I can see” in a big public room, said Jerome Sumaylo of San Francisco.
Walter Lei of San Francisco says banning the small rooms seems discriminatory because it is based on the presumption of criminal activity.
“Did they refuse to issue … [a bar] license to anybody?” he said, citing the problems that can emanate at bars.
Discrimination is not the issue, said Mayor Carole Groom.
She and the other council members directed city staff and police to look into measures that might make private rooms safer, such as windows, cameras and other requisite security measures.
But police seemed skeptical that those would be sufficient. Several crime-ridden private karaoke establishments in San Bruno had those measures, and police still spent a lot of time and money there, they said. With city budgets being tight, Manheimer said the police department does not have the money and the time to constantly enforce security measures.