The Baltimore City Council's plan to kill live entertainment

I just became aware of this idiot piece of legislation that the City Council is planning. As a performer, I can tell you that it's already difficult to get booked into many places in the city because they charge a tax when there's live entertainment.

This bill proposed by Rawlings-Blake sets up a whole bureaucracy and imposes not only license fees, but paperwork requirements that you and I know will be seen as "too much trouble" by the owners of many venues. A licensed venue would have to file and maintain written plans for parking, traffic, indoor and outdoor security, and sanitation.

I've read the entire bill as it stands, and I swear, it looks to me as though they would require a cemetery to get a license to have a bugler play Taps or a piper play at a funeral. I'm not certain that even churches and funeral parlors would be exempt; there's no specific language exempting them. "Live entertainment" is broadly defined to include any:

As I read the bill, it could even be misused to ban the reading of Scripture in churches, synagogues and mosques. After all, the Holy Bible, the Torah and the Koran are all "books," and parts of each of them include "poetry."

This link takes you to a slide show summarizing the plan:

This one is the latest version of the bill: