Drinking hour change defeated

Drinking hours will end at midnight in Hannibal Square — for now.

An alcohol ordinance, which seeks to push drinking hours back to 2 a.m. every day except Sunday for restaurants in the commercial district along the west end of West New England Avenue, was pulled from the July 25 Winter Park City Commission agenda.

That came after a public outcry at a Planning and Zoning Board meeting on July 12 that led the Board to shoot down the ordinance.

The issue may come to another climax at a future Commission meeting if a revised drinking hours ordinance appears on the agenda, Mayor Ken Bradley said. He hopes that the city will eventually have more uniform rules governing restaurants.

“The conditional use we have established is not sensible,” he said. “We need to look at this again. This is something we’re going to be very contemplative with.”

This is the fourth time since 1997 that the city has seen a concerted effort by Hannibal Square restaurateurs to have their alcohol sales hours pushed back.

That change had been avoided for nearly 15 years by residents who lived within 300 feet of restaurants such as Dexter’s, Chez Vincent and the former Hot Olives location.

Bradley said that 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. The rules are too inconsistent now, he said.

“You can be across the street from a church in one neighborhood and be open until 2 a.m. and be across from a church in another neighborhood and have to close at midnight,” he said.

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. Four times, restaurant owners, led by Dexter’s owner Dexter Richardson, have officially approached the Planning and Zoning Board 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?”