Biz hours under review

Late drinking hours and the survival of restaurants again riled Winter Park City Hall on Monday, as residents, business owners and commissioners battled over whether to pass uniform laws governing alcohol sales in the city.

For more than two decades, the city has been pockmarked by businesses who aren’t allowed to stay open past midnight, including parts of New England Avenue in the Hannibal Square district, as well as the newly opened Shipyard Emporium on Fairbanks Avenue.

The city’s Planning and Zoning Department was tapped to confer with residents about more uniform hours and will be giving those recommendations to the Commission for a future vote.

Root of restrictions

The Shipyard Emporium is even more restricted, closing at 10 p.m. Meanwhile other businesses, such as those on Park Avenue and other parts of Fairbanks, including The Boathouse and Drake’s Bar and Fiddler’s Green, are allowed to stay open until 2 a.m.

Those differing hours come from conditional-use permits, handed out by the city, for businesses to operate within certain hours and to observe certain rules governing the sale of alcohol and the use of live bands.

But even the mayor said that those rules have been too inconsistent.

“I think the use of conditional use has gotten completely out of hand,” Mayor Ken Bradley said. “We have laws that aren’t consistent.”

But Commissioner Tom McMacken said that those conditional uses exist because the city itself wasn’t designed uniformly.

“You don’t have uniform conditions throughout the city, and that’s why you have conditional uses,” he said.

Business owners weigh in

The discrepancy in hours has riled some business owners, who say they should be allowed to take advantage of later hours if other restaurants in the city can.

Even some restaurant owners who benefit from the lopsided hours in the city said the rules should change. Adam Heath said his Boathouse restaurant enjoys an unfair advantage compared to businesses just a few feet away because it can stay open later.

“We do think it should be fair that other places should be open later,” Heath said.

Real estate developer Dan Bellows, who helped redevelop the Hannibal Square area from a historically blighted community in the 1980s into its modern iteration, said that in the past, residents hadn’t mentioned business hours as a concern, even when crime in the area was far worse.

“It was a free-for-all back then,” Bellows said. “Prostitution, drugs. They never came to a City Commission meeting then saying ‘We have a problem.’”

Public opposes later hours

But at Monday night’s meeting, the crowd was more vocal in opposition to the idea of moving hours back.

“When these establishments went and opened on the west side, the history was the city said they were not going to lengthen the hours of alcohol that was sold,” resident Sally Flynn said. “I’d like to see the Commission stand by that promise.”

A.C. Carson, from the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, which stands a block away from Dexter’s Restaurant, opposed later hours.

“It might benefit the sales of the alcohol, but the recipients of that won’t benefit from that,” Carson said. “They’ll have to drive home late at night. There will be more DUIs. The cutoff time of 12 o’clock is plenty of time to get stone drunk. Extending that … is a black eye to the community.”