In September 2007, the Supreme Court of Catalunya upheld provisions of a law passed in 2004. La Ordenanza de Locales de Publica Concurrencia (The Public Attendance Venues Ordinance), gave clubs de alterne nearly four years to fulfill certain conditions in order to renew their licences by the first day of 2008. Some of these conditions are concerned with hygiene and noise-level. Others are related to geography: they may not be located within a hundred metres of each other, of educational or health centres, or governmental organisations. And they can’t exist in buildings where people live. For many clubs, these are impossible requirements to fulfill, and so they face closure.
ACECA, who lost the dispute against the ordinance in the Supreme Court, sees this as an all-out assault on the sector, though the Ajunatment asserts that it is merely trying to regulate the conditions in the clubs. “We’re not looking to apply any kind of discrimination,” Francesc Santiago, a spokesperson for the Ajuntament, told Metropolitan. “This Ajuntament wants only to introduce regulatory clauses regarding the licenses of these kinds of places. If they can’t make the changes, they can’t have a license. This provides a mark of security also for them. The ordinances are general and they apply to other businesses as well.”
While this may be true for some of the regulations, such as noise pollution and providing security guards where more than 50 people are gathered, it’s not true for the conditions stated above, and Gemma Mañosa, the Secretary Director of ACECA, argued that they are entirely unfair. “The people we represent spent a lot of money to do what they possibly could. We did what they asked us to do, isolating the sound, putting in air-conditioning, bidets. But some things we can’t do. We can’t change the width of the street, for example.”
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