Loud Country Music Drowns Out Kathy Castor's "I Told You So" Moment

The Hillsborough County Commission voted 6-1 to allow Clear Channel one year to get the noise under control at the Ford Amphitheatre. Kathy Castor was the one dissenting vote. She was troubled that the agreement allowed Clear Channel to proceed with concerts for the next year without any recourse or penalty for additional violations.

Despite being the one lone sane member of the County Commission, Kathy only gets one vote. Thus Clear Channel was given a free pass to spend the next full year wreaking aural havoc in the area. They took their first opportunity to do just that last Saturday, registering sound levels of up to 26 decibels over what is allowed.

Saturday night's Alan Jackson show cranked up the honky tonk way past
noise limits at the Ford Amphitheatre, and there wasn't anything
Hillsborough County could do about it.

An inability to enforce its own noise rules came two weeks after
commissioners agreed to stop citing Clear Channel Entertainment for a
year to give it time to muffle concert noise.

[...]

Concerts have regularly exceeded county noise limits over the summer
and fall, but none has measured levels as high as that of the Alan
Jackson performance, according to EPC records.

[...]

"This is what I was concerned about," said Commissioner Kathy Castor,
the lone dissenting vote. "To give Clear Channel a year to continually
violate the law isn't right for the residents who live there. I'm
disappointed it turned out this way."

I just hope the voters out there by the Ford Amphitheatre remember this when it comes time to vote in 2006 and 2008. Obviously Mark Sharpe, Brian Blair, Ken Hagan, Jim Norman, Tom Scott and Ronda Storms care more about Clear Channel's bottom line than the residents of Hillsborough County.