Planning Board holds workshop on proposed 3,300-seat Portland Music Hall at 385 Congress; traffic and parking remain open issues

The City of Portland Planning Board hosted a workshop on May 27, 2025, for a proposed 3,300-seat, approximately 65,000-square-foot music venue at Lot 3 of the 385 Congress Street subdivision. The applicant is Portland Music (Portland Music Holdings LLC), represented by Sebago Technics and Live Nation New England; Live Nation said it intends to operate the venue. City staff and the applicant focused the session on transportation and pedestrian access, and staff said that no formal decisions would be made at the workshop.

What was presented: City staff (Taylor) summarized the project and the status of the traffic-movement-permit (TMP) process. The venue would sit in the B3 downtown business zone on a roughly 38,000-square-foot lot currently occupied by single-story commercial buildings and a public parking lot. The applicant described a design with active ground-floor frontage, an on-site bus and trailer parking area sized for two tractor trailers and four buses, and no on-site patron parking. The applicant told the board they have preliminary, negotiated agreements with two nearby garages (Temple Street and Custom House) to provide roughly 1,300 dedicated parking spaces on event nights at discounted event rates, and they identified approximately five garages within a 0.4-mile radius totaling about 2,800 spaces.

Traffic, TMP process and counts: The city held a TMP scoping meeting on May 13; staff asked the applicant to provide additional parking-occupancy and traffic-count data, including counts taken during a…