So the City of Dallas formed the Hospitality and Nightlife Task Force a year ago. Now what?

There’s no such thing as a quiet evening stroll in Deep Ellum,” then-senior editor Renee Umsted wrote for the Advocate in 2021.

Increasingly, that lack of quiet nights has reached the more residential areas of our neighborhood. Reports came in that Fair Park’s Breakaway Music Festival could be heard miles away within our homes.

Even before that Fair Park fiasco, the complaints came in, and code enforcement ramped up.

It’s been a year since music lovers’ staple Revelers Hall in the Bishop Arts District received an initial warning for breaking code.

The first violation found was charging a music cover fee, a practice the restaurant had for over six years. Then, it was for keeping their doors open. And they weren’t alone.

Co-owner Jason Roberts says he first saw Deep Ellum’s The Free Man owner, John Jay Myers, share about the business receiving citations in October 2025. Then, Revelers Hall received their own notice a week later.

“So we brought it public,” Roberts says. “We went online and just mentioned, ‘Hey, we’re also struggling with this, and it’s not something we knew about and obviously something we need to get rectified,’ but we were worried about being shut down.”

The calls for support came in quickly, leading to the formation of the Hospitality and Nightlife Task Force, which was announced on Halloween 2025. The task force initially came with three main objectives: reviewing the music fee issue, reexamining the City’s noise ordinance and exploring the creation of a new entertainment permit that supports innovation and flexibility.

Some of those recommendations in the works have been advocated for previously, Stephanie Keller Hudiburg, executive director of the Deep Ellum Foundation, noted. Though she did not participate in the task force, she says the Deep Ellum Community Safety Plan the foundation developed in 2022 and 2026 discusses nightlife quite a bit.

“We also were kind of the architects of the noise task force report on how do we integrate noise, and we did brief that to Quality of Life (, Arts and Culture Committee) a couple years ago, and so that was in that was integrated into the current iteration of the entertainment permit, so we’ve been kind of working on this stuff for a minute,” she says.

The code department had previously created a dedicated Deep Ellum task force prior to the citywide nighttime task force, which Hudiburg adds was partly at the foundation’s request because of a lack of code officers at night.

“The City of Dallas has a lot of code officers, and we often find that we end up advocating for things that the City does and goods and services that are provided during the day to equally be considered for the nighttime,” she says. “And so there’s a lot of code officers that do weeds and go and look in residential neighborhoods, but we didn’t have enough code officers working at night, and so the code department had discussed at a conference a couple years ago and announced that they were going to have an increase in nighttime code support and that actually hadn’t happened yet.”

The increased code support citywide certainly made its mark since, highlighting a desire for change.

“We need to modernize, from a policy standpoint, in the city to meet nightlife where it’s at, and that means making sure that it’s working for the businesses that are serving that important cultural need in our city and economic need,” Hudiburg says. “But also making sure that it does work for our residents, that it does happen in a safe manner, and so those are all complicated things that really require thought and intentionality.”

Jesse Lopez, a Bishop Arts neighbor with small business experience, joined the task force after expressing a desire to become more involved in city matters to District 1 Council member Chad West.

Lopez says some of what he observed in the Bishop Arts District was an increase in developers over the last five years building around the already active nightlife.

“But we’ve always known that Bishop Arts is Bishop Arts,” he told the Advocate in April. “It’s like, we can’t change the way that Bishop Arts runs just because there’s a new development in town. So there was a lot of tension there.”

He added that there were a lot of complaints from the local community regarding noise.

“I’ve spoken to one of my good friends (who) owns Taco y Vino … he kept getting complaints about noise,” Lopez says. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve always played music from 6 to 9 p.m. It’s part of my dinner experience.’ But the building behind him kept getting noise complaints.”

When it comes to working on the task force, Lopez says most of what was discussed was the need to upgrade City Code “to basically make code enforcement a little bit fairer for all establishments.”

“One thing that surprised me, that blew my mind, was that Chapter 14, which is like basically the code that has been enforced in Dallas, is like Prohibition era type of code,” Lopez says. “We never really updated a lot of things around nightlife and hospitality, so it just blew my mind that we were operating like an old, legacy city.”

Chapter 14 specifically defines Dance Halls, the licenses required, fees and the punishments that come with operating what could be considered one out of compliance.

He says that some of the task force discussion centered around other cities, from Sacramento to Philadelphia, and looking into how those cities thought about City Code.

Those recommendations were then presented at Life in Deep Ellum on Feb. 18, 2026, and went through the Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee, chaired by District 3 Council member Zarin Gracey.

When we spoke to Roberts in the spring about the updates, he said that one of the motivations for working on these changes was FIFA.

“There’s a couple of rationales from the City’s standpoint, to see what should move this forward,” Roberts said in April. “Originally what I heard some of the rationale was, we need to get some of this addressed just because we have this major international event occurring, and it’s now created this weird issue that affects a lot of our live music or live ‘entertainment spaces.’”

Well, FIFA came and went last season, and the Hospitality and Nightlife Task Force recommendations are still making their way to fruition.

Task Force recommendations with the staff implementation and draft ordinance proposal were presented to the Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee on June 15, 2026, with the committee deliberating how to move forward with the recommendations throughout the summer.

In a brief summary, those recommendations included:

Implementing new versions of entertainment license and a late-night entertainment license.

Creating security management systems that add additional late-night requirements.

Updated regulations for sound management.

Moving to an “education first” strategy for enforcement.

Updating Chapter 14 of City Code.

“There is a lot of enforcement happening, and I don’t remember the education piece,” Gracey says. “I just don’t, and I don’t even know what the education piece looked like, but it doesn’t feel like, based on some of the people that are reaching out, it doesn’t feel like it’s happening at all.”

Acknowledging that there are some bad actors, Gracey adds that he’s concerned about how these updates are taking effect.

“It’s not playing out in real time like it reads on paper, and again, I think the only issue is that entertainment license piece, and right now it just sounds like, feels like, everybody’s just getting tickets for it, and potentially having to go and appeal their (current) license.”

In the time it is taking to make these updates, some establishments have suffered.

The Dallas Morning News reported in September that dozens of cases regarding code violations have been at the Dallas Municipal Court, with some tickets reaching “$2,000 at most if a defendant’s found guilty.”

As the nightlife and hospitality changes continue to go through different iterations to City staff, the latest updates at the time of writing were heard by the Arts and Culture Advisory Commission on Oct. 15, 2026.

With the proposed Entertainment Licenses, because there is a shift in fees, the City Council can not yet entertain the latest proposal. A fee study via a third party has to take place to ensure that the fee that will be charged for the application of the license is included in the council action item.

The City Manager’s office authorized the special permission required for the fee study on Oct. 15, 2026, via a special needs memo.

“Essentially, the special needs memo allows us to move through an expedited procurement process rather than the traditional solicitation process (for the fee study),” Director of the Office of Arts and Culture Martine Elyse Philippe said during the meeting. “And my dream is that we will get this council action item squared away before the end of this calendar year.”

The Nighttime Economy Division of the Office of Arts and Culture is currently developing the license application platform. Educational materials are also in the works, still in collaboration with the Hospitality and Nightlife Task Force.

“We are working on drafting and reviewing some educational resources that will support businesses in understanding and navigating this new entertainment license and its requirements,” she says. “One of the efforts that I’m most excited about is the Good Neighbor Guidebook, mainly because we have so many entertainment districts, if you will, close to residential neighborhoods, and we certainly want our operators to be good neighbors and to ensure that residents, especially legacy residents who are watching their neighborhoods take a turn into having a thriving nightlife exist that, again, they’re being good neighbors and working to ensure that our residents can maintain a certain quality of life while we have these thriving businesses exist.”

The council still has not officially implemented the new recommendations fully as of writing.

“I want to do it in a way that creates, that continues the longevity. I don’t want this to unintentionally hurt restaurants and our nighttime economy by activating like a grumpy old man,” Gracey says. “I’m a grump, you know what I mean, by shutting everything down. So that’s what I’m concerned about.”

With the shift from the music fee at Revelers Hall to optional support from patrons, the musician funding has dwindled.

“The problem is once people see that, ‘I don’t have to pay this thing,’ a lot, about 50% of people, don’t pay it,” Roberts says. “And so it just means that we’re unable to compensate the bands as much as we were before. And so we are starting to size the bands down. We’re going from five-piece bands to three-piece artists, just to make the numbers work. So ultimately, this has kind of hurt Dallas’s live artists, live musicians. It’s giving them less venues to perform at.”