Madison's Halloween plan

The city of Madison recently released a plan to deal with the "problem" of the Halloween party on State Street. Some of the plan is good. Some of it is asking for problems. And some of it is so wacky it will make you laugh out loud.

Seems the folks running the city took the Marc Eisen's advice to embrace the party, but ran in the wrong direction with it. They want to try to bill this as some sort of community festival. Reality check - After having the mayor screaming for years that he wants to shut the whole thing down because it is too destructive, the biggest ad campaign in the world isn't going to convince anyone to dress up their kids and head downtown.

Eisen is right though. The city should embrace the party and the mayor should stop threatening to shut it down. Every time he does this he might as well throw gas on the bonfire on State Street because it is throwing a challenge in the face of drunk college students across the Midwest.

I don't think the idea to charge admission is a bad one or a threat to civil rights as Paul Soglin does, but he does have some other ideas there worth looking at before this fall. What is a bad idea though is trying to limit the ticket sales to 50,000 people when you know that 70-80,000 people attended last time is asking for a fight. 20,000 drunk college students that can't get into State Street is the gasoline a riot will need to really get going. And the riot will be outside of State Street where most of the officers will be located.

Or they will push their through the plastic snow fencing barriers and enter the State Street area pissed off. I kid you not. That is what the plan is to keep people out of State Street without a ticket. The plastic fencing to the drunk student is going to be the equivalent of waving a red flag in front of a bull.

My two-year-old got through that fencing up by the Capitol because he wanted to see the work vehicles up close so I don't think this will keep out any college kids fueled by liquor. And the city won't get the ticket reveune from those that storm the plastic fences.

Instead of trying to keep some people out, why not give them a reason to buy the tickets? How about we work out drink and food specials with the State Street bars and restaurants that people only have access to if they buy a ticket?

And why won't the city consider having the bars open all night on Halloween to avoid the mass dump out? The bars that want to stay open all night could buy a special permit for the night to help generate revenue to pay for the cost of the policing.

The police have done a remarkable job with this event in the last couple of years so I'm not sure a giant plan is even needed for this event. But it's probably good the city is trying to hash it our early so they can make changes.

Hopefully this also means that the city has started down the path of acceptance instead of threatening to end party.

Update/Correction: Turns out state law prevents Madison from keeping the bars open all night. It is only allowed on New Years Eve. Seems like if we allow it one night, we should allow cities to apply to do it once in a while on other nights.