Mayor Stephanie Miner at The Sound Garden

Mayor Stephanie Miner announces a deal that has been reached - which exempts games, videos and music from provisions in the city's secondhand dealer's law - during a news conference Friday at The Sound Garden in Armory Square. At right is Common Councilor Khalid Bey, who helped with the legislation.

(Lauren Long | llong@syracuse.com)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - The Sound Garden record store will stay in Syracuse if the city council approves a compromise negotiated this week by Mayor Stephanie Miner and Common Councilor Khalid Bey.

Bey plans to introduce legislation Monday to amend the city's secondhand dealer law in a way that satisfies Sound Garden owner Bryan Burkert, who said the existing law would force him to shut the Syracuse store.

Miner said Burkert and his attorney contacted her office Wednesday, after their efforts to work with the Common Council on a compromise unraveled. Miner's chief of staff, Bill Ryan, police officials and Bey immediately began discussions with store representatives.

"They were incredibly frustrated," Miner said. "They wanted to stay in Syracuse. We said, 'We think we can find a compromise for both sides. Let's sit down and work it out.' That's exactly what we did and, frankly, in less than 48 hours we've been able to do that."

The secondhand dealer law aims to discourage the fencing of stolen goods. It requires secondhand stores to log each item they buy from customers into an online database, and to hold the items seven days.

Burkert said the law would devalue the store's CDs and DVDs, and would force him to hire more staff for data entry. Under the deal announced today, The Sound Garden will log in up to five individual items, but can summarize the transaction if more than five are involved.

The amendment also will exempt secondhand dealers in the downtown business district from the seven-day wait to sell music, videos or video games. And it will allow them to stay open later than the 8 p.m. curfew in the original law -- until 10 p.m. Thursday and midnight Friday and Saturday.

Bey said he is confident the amendment will pass Monday. Councilor Jake Barrett, who had proposed a different amendment that was rejected by The Sound Garden, expressed support for the new version and will co-sponsor it.

Burkert said he was comfortable with the new deal, pending approval from his lawyer, Robert Romeo. Romeo could not immediately be reached, but Miner said he had agreed to the compromise.

The record store, a retail anchor in renovated Armory Square for 17 years, has a legion of fans who have bombarded city officials with complaints since Burkert said he might have to shut down.

Without that support, Burkert said he might not have persuaded city officials to amend the law. He has been talking with city councilors about his concerns since February, with no progress until now, he said. "Without the outpouring from the community, I don't know if this gets done,'' he said.

The case has also begun to attract national attention. Kevin Lipson, vice president of sales at Universal Media Group, the world's largest record company, said today that he was planning to mobilize national recording artists and their fans to get involved.

The Sound Garden, a two-store chain based in Baltimore, is highly regarded in the recording industry, Lipson said.

Miner said the showdown with Sound Garden never should have reached the point where the store felt forced to leave town. Without naming anyone specifically, she blamed members of the Common Council.

"This is just another episode of my continuing frustration with the majority of the council,'' Miner said. "There are real solutions that require work to sit down and do it, and there seems to be a direct avoidance of that. Instead, there's name-calling and public persecution and then threats. It's just useless escalation.''

Councilor Barrett, who chairs the public safety committee, led the effort to compromise with The Sound Garden until Wednesday. Barrett pointed out that the secondhand dealer law was introduced and implemented by Miner's police department.

The council's efforts to amend the law were constrained by what police officials said was necessary, Barrett said. Those requirements apparently loosened in the last two days. "This is vastly different'' from what police required before, he said,

Contact Tim Knauss at tknauss@syracuse.com or 315-470-3023.