Unregulated busking may be busted in Madison.

State Street musicians and others performing for donations have not been subject to fees or official rules despite calls for regulation from the city’s street vending coordinator. Attempts in past decades to regulate musicians under the city’s noise ordinances have been roundly rejected by the courts.

But during this year’s Dane County Farmers’ Markets on the Capitol Square, a glut of street performers — including balloon hat artists and a masseuse — has made even Ald. Mike Verveer, 4th District, change his position on the issue.
“I really thought it was a solution in search of a problem,” Verveer said. “Now staff is bringing this to our attention again, and in a more adamant way.”

Verveer had been reluctant to regulate street musicians because he said they contribute to the “funky, eclectic” nature of State Street. But he now says he is willing to sponsor an ordinance that would regulate the time, place and manner of street performers, similar to how the city has regulated panhandling.

At a Vending Oversight Committee meeting last week, Warren Hansen, Madison’s street vending coordinator, suggested charging performers $50 for an annual permit, or $10 a day and setting standards for things like how close they could operate to a business and one another.

The prospect of regulation doesn’t sit well with Scott “Boo” Kiker. As part of the Boo Bradley Band, a guitar and washboard duo with Brad Selz, Kiker, 40, has filled State Street with the blues and ragtime sounds of Charlie Patton and Blind Boy Fuller for five years.

“Madison should always realize that it’s allowing something beautiful to happen,” Kiker said. The city is one of the few of its size that doesn’t regulate street performers, he added.

Several other cities charge street performers an annual fee, from $15 in New Orleans to $75 in Chicago. Some regulate the hours, locations and volume of performances. In Wilmington, N.C., the city council adopted a law restricting donations to street performers, which was ruled unconstitutional by a local judge in November.

If Madison imposed a fee for buskers, Catfish Stephenson, 60, who plays a Dobro steel guitar outside the Wisconsin Historical Museum, said “I would get arrested. I would fight it.”

Street musicians don’t earn much, said Stephenson, who estimates he makes about $4,000 a year in cash and coin. “For some of us that’s our livelihood,” he said.

Stephenson has noticed an increase in young musicians crowding the farmers’ market on Saturdays. Food and art vendors have complained in the past that they have to pay hundreds of dollars in fees and insurance for their booths, but musicians don’t pay anything.

“The people who are putting this on consider people like me and Boo as vultures,” Stephenson said. “They don’t realize that the reason they came to this farmers’ market, the reason they came to this city was because of the diversity. People lose sight of that eventually.”

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The proposal: Language is still being drafted, but proposals floated at a recent vending oversight committee include charging street performers a $50 annual permit fee, or $10 a day, to perform in public places. The ordinance may also specify when and where musicians can perform, how loud their music can be and how far apart they should be from each other.

What’s next: Ald. Mike Verveer is working with the vending coordinator and city attorney to draft an ordinance that may be ready for review later this month.