Turning back the clock

The Winter Park City Commission may appeal a long-standing ordinance banning late night alcohol sales in the Hannibal Square neighborhood this month.

By Tuesday, June 12, it could be past its first hurdle — the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission.

That change could signal the end of an era when residents at the west end of New England Avenue successfully held off the rolling back of alcohol sales hours, which would effectively allow restaurants to sell alcohol as late as 2 a.m. within 300 feet of nearby homes.

Mayor Ken Bradley said he’s aware of the concerns and wants to keep as many people happy as possible, but he wants to level the playing field for businesses.

“I know there are a lot of concerns about where alcohol is served,” Bradley said. “We don’t want to turn something positive into a negative, so we have to be cautious about this. But I think rules should be consistent throughout the city.”

Residents speak up

Residents and local business owners have fought the battle over more consistent alcohol sales hours for all businesses in search of shifting the balance toward either quieter nights or more business. A block of 21 homes sits directly adjacent to the Hannibal Square parking lot.

Mary Daniels is used to that fight by now. Her tiny white brick home along Canton Avenue is only a few blocks west of the restaurants.

She also regularly eats at Dexter’s and Chez Vincent — the two Hannibal Square restaurants that are the closest to her home. But every few years, she has stood up at the podium in the Winter Park Commission Chambers and tried to stop the city from relaxing alcohol sales rules.

“I think it’s been at least 3 to 4 times about the same issue, if not more,” she said. “I don’t want to prohibit anyone from making a living, but at what expense?”

That expense would be the peace and quiet of residents, she said. And those residents may be there because of the city donating land for affordable housing.

“They built affordable housing, all the Habitat (for Humanity) homes, right there,” she said. “You’re supporting more residential in the community, but you don’t want to protect it. When does it stop?”

So far, the businesses along the intersection of New England and North Pennsylvania avenues have been consistently rebuffed after restaurants have repeatedly banded together to lobby the Commission to push back their drinking hours.

Root of the rules

Currently restaurants have special zoning ordinances governing their hours on a conditional basis, though all are governed under a special ordinance restricting alcohol sales hours in the Hannibal Square area.

Those rules were first established in 1997, keeping restaurants from selling alcohol beyond 11 p.m. on Sundays through Thursdays and past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. The rationale behind the laws was to prevent a resurgence of the blighted area that had dominated Hannibal Square before the mid-1990s.

“The original purpose of that ordinance was to eliminate that from being a bar and nightclub area,” Winter Park attorney Kenneth Murrah said. “It’s retained that feature since it’s been adopted.”

The last time an alcohol sales ordinance was passed by the Commission in 2009, local developer Dan Bellows said that the previous blight wouldn’t return because the businesses weren’t the same type.

“I remember in ’89, it was boarded-up building after boarded-up building, vacant lots,” Bellows said. “The occupiers of Hannibal Square were prostitutes, drug dealers. That’s what was hanging out in that area. That’s all changed since then.”

Push for equality

And in that time, restaurant owners have continued to push for later sales hours. Three times, restaurant owners, led by Dexter’s owner Dexter Richardson, have officially approached the Planning and Zoning Commission and the City Commission to try to get that special set of earlier hours overturned. They wanted an equal chance at nabbing traffic as restaurants on Park Avenue, they said.

“After Dexter’s closes here, you can walk two blocks to Fiddler’s Green and Luma and get drinks as late as you like,” Hannibal Square Association President Baxter Mathews said in 2009, the last time another drinking ordinance, punishing restaurants and bars for breaking city rules, was passed. That ordinance allows the city to scale back a restaurant’s business hours as punishment for noise ordinance violations or selling to underage drinkers.

Park Avenue restaurants are allowed to operate effectively as bars until 2 a.m. Monday through Saturday, and midnight on Sundays.

That disparate set of hours compared to Hannibal Square has business owners continuing to push for a change. But some nearby residents don’t like the idea, pointing to the reasons that the hours were imposed in the first place.

“How much food is going to be served from 12 to 2 a.m.?” Daniels asked. “It’s going to turn into a full-blown bar. There were problems there before, so why are they going back to that?”

The issue may come to another climax at the July 25 City Commission meeting, when the ordinance appears on the agenda.

Daniels plans to be there again, standing at the podium, pleading to keep things the way they’ve been for 14 years.

“My feelings are still the same,” she said. “I’m in opposition to it, and I’m praying that it doesn’t happen, but I don’t know.”