The Safety and Licensing Committee met on 06/09/2021. A big discussion item at May’s Safety and Licensing Committee meeting had been the City’s current policy allowing gas station convenience stores to only sell beer and not wine or liquor. They had voted to hold that item until this meeting and I thought that would be the main item for discussion again, but they voted to go along with the staff recommendation with little discussion.
The bulk of the meeting turned out to be related to the liquor license renewal for Core’s Lounge. This license renewal wasn’t even an individual item but was part of an item that consisted of license renewals for multiple businesses.
Two residents of the street behind Core’s Lounge attended the meeting and asked the committee to not renew their license. They said that there have been ongoing noise problems with the establishment related to loud music that has been an ongoing problem since the business opened in December of 2019. They voiced their concerns at the Safety and Licensing committee meeting last year, but the music is still too loud.
The business owner had said that he was not aware of the issue and would do anything to fix it. He, the neighbors, and a police officer met and figured out what an appropriate music level was, but the neighbors claim that agreement was not maintained by the business owner. In May alone, over a three week period, one of the neighbors had to call the police 7 times. It was their understanding that noise would not be able to be heard beyond 75 feet from the business, but one of the neighbors could hear it over the sound of her television and on the far end of her house and the other could hear it in her bedroom which was 100 feet away.
The business did not fit well in a residential neighborhood where people go to bed at 10 or 11 at night. Their main hours of operation are the evening until 2 in the morning, and the sleep disruptions are becoming a health issue.
The two residents were frustrated that the problems persisted even after numerous calls to the police.
One issue that the committee was facing was that they could only take certain things into consideration when deciding to not renew a business’ license.
Attorney Glad said that under the State’s alcohol licensing chapter a municipality could refuse to renew a license only for the causes listed in the statutes, a lot of which were drug related and didn’t apply to this situation. The most applicable reasons to potentially deny the business’ license renewal would be if “a person keeps or maintains a disorderly or riotous or indecent or improper house; a person has sold or given away alcohol beverages to known habitual drunkards; or the person does not possess the qualifications required under this chapter to hold a license.”
Another issue, tied into that first issue, was that although the police had come out multiple times in response to complaints, the noise level they had observed did not rise to the level of a citable offense. In fact, the police had not only responded to specific complaints but had gone out on nights where there was not much else going on and simply sat in the neighborhood listening to what they could hear and were not able to hear anything they could give a citation for, although at least some of the officer said they could hear the bass playing. Chief Thomas said that a common comment from officers was that cars driving down College Avenue with their windows open and radios on were louder than the noise from Core’s Lounge. Additionally, Appleton has some sort of demerit system for liquor licenses, but because no citations have been issued against this business, it has no demerits either. The end result is that there is not necessarily any actual record or evidence beyond uncorroborated complaints that this business is causing disruption to the neighborhood.
Attorney Glad did say that there would need to be proof presented, but he also said that the statute was rather vague and it had survived challenges on the vagueness. He said “disorderly, riotous, indecent, and improper” had to be breaches of the peace which, nowadays, generally refered to issues related to disorderly conduct.
Finally, and in my opinion most confusingly, there was a timeline issue if the committee (and next week the Common Council) did anything other than vote to recommend approving the license. The license expires at the end of the month, but it can’t be non-renewed or revoked without cause, without the licensee being notified, and without a hearing taking place. The notification to the licensee that the license was going to be revoked or not renewed needed to be sent within a certain timeframe before the meeting at which it would be revoked or not renewed, and the logistics of getting that done before June 30th were too much to be practical. If they allowed the license to expire without a hearing, the city would be opening itself up to legal liability.
Attorney Glad said that when the city had faced issues like that in the past they were solved by approving the license and then starting revocation procedures instead of not renewing the licenses.
The timeline issues were confusing both to the committee members and also to me at home. I can’t speak to what caused the committee members’ confusion, but, for myself, I can say I was confused by the timelines the attorney gave for notifying a business of a non-renewal vs. a revocation. A hearing needed to be held in either of those cases so that the license holder to mount a defense, but the notification period seemed to be different in each situation and more vague and non-defined for a non-renewal than for a revocation. So, I thought that if they were going to go the non-renewal route they might be able to give the legally required notice and hold a special committee meeting prior to the Common Council meeting on 06/16, but there turned out to not be enough time for that.
As I said, the committee members were also confused on the required timeline and actually voted to separate Core’s Lounge’s license renewal from the rest of the license renewals with the intention of holding it for a special committee meeting only to then be told by the attorney that timing was still an issue with that route at which point they voted to put it back in with the other renewals.
Essentially due to the timing issues, they committee (and the Common Council next week also) was placed in a position where the only option they could take was to vote to recommend approving the license renewal with the hope that the license revocation process could be started after the license was approved.
[Honestly, that seems absolutely bizarre to me, and I don’t understand what the point of having the committee and the Common Council vote on license renewals is if the process is set up to prevent them from actually being able to legally carry out the non-renewal process. It seems like the renewal process should be set up so that the vote to renew takes place a couple months before the license expires instead of 2 weeks before it expires. That way when issues come up there would be enough of a buffer that they could be dealt with before the fact instead of after.]
The Alderpersons weren’t necessarily pleased with that option, and would have preferred (or so it seemed to me) to hold the item for a future meeting. Alderperson Katie Van Zeeland (District 5) said she felt like they were missing a lot of information and didn’t feel comfortable taking action without also allowing the business owner to speak.
There were frustrations voiced that the noise issues at the establishment had not been taken care of. Alderperson Michael Smith (District 10) who is the alderperson for the district this neighborhood is in said that he had worked with the residents, the police, and the business owner last year trying to find the right volume level and was disappointed that the issue wasn’t resolved even after complaints had been submitted for over a year. He found it difficult to believe that just because the problem didn’t rise to a level the police could issue citations for that they would not be able to revoke the business’ license. He noted that even though the police weren’t issuing citations they had indicated they could hear the bass music. People not being able to sleep and having to call the police regularly was an issue and he would have a hard time supporting this license renewal.
Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) who is the alderperson of the district on the opposite side of College Avenue directly across from Core’s Lounge said that this was the hard work of the committee, dealing with conflicts between business interests and residential interests. When this issue came up last year, he had been willing to see what happened with the negotiations between the business owner and the residents and that a good faith effort would be made work things out. But that seemed not to have happened. He thought something must be seriously wrong for that number of complaints to be still being made. He pointed out that the events the Health Department grants noise variances for usually end at 10 or 11 at night, because after that point things need to be quiet so that residents can sleep. If they’re not sleeping their quality of life is being affected. He also noted that the City of Appleton has a Health In All Policies guideline, with the implication being that health should be considered in this situation. He felt terrible for the residents and that this situation was still going on a year later, and said he felt strongly about doing what they could to probably not renew the license.
Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim (District 13) was interested in knowing what the Health Department thought about this issue or how it dealt with noise variances. She also agreed that they were balancing issues of business vs. homeownership and quality of life for residents. She did want to make sure that their actions would not interfere with the due process of the business owner.
In the end the committee voted to approve the license renewal 4-0 (Alderperson Matt Reed, District 8, was excused from this meeting), but Alderperson Van Zeeland went out of her way to explain to the community members in the room that this was something they procedurally had to do but that Alderperson Smith was willing to work with them to represent their interests and work on starting the revocation process.
According to Attorney Glad the revocation process needed to start with a citizen complaint. It couldn’t come from the committee as an entity, but needed to come from an Appleton resident. Alderperson Smith could submit that, or the residents who were experiencing the issues could.
It is not, however, guaranteed that if the revocation process is implemented that it will be successful. As Attorney Glad explained, the police department has received dozens of complaints and gone out and were not able to corroborate any of them. There may be three witnesses claiming that the business causes noise, but the business owner could have 30-40 police officers come and say they were called to the area and did not hear noise or could not substantiate it to the level of probable cause required to issue a citation. That is the process put in place to protect businesses from being ticketed based simply on allegations.
[This situation makes it sound to me like the city needs to be extra careful when first granting a liquor license to a bar, because it sounds like once it’s granted, unless the license holder messes up, the city is bound to renew it. It sounds like a dangerous idea to grant a license unless you’re absolutely positive that a location is a good place for a restaurant or bar.
In this case, the location frankly doesn’t seem particularly appropriate for a bar. Although it’s on College Avenue, the street right behind it is residential and the area on the other side of College Avenue from it is also residential. There’s just that narrow strip of commercial properties sandwiched between residential zoning. The other commercial endeavors in that strip look like places that close at 10pm at the latest (Little Caesars, Stuc’s Pizza, a printing shop, and a sewing supply shop), whereas Core’s Lounge is open until 2 in the morning.
That doesn’t mean the business owner is doing anything wrong however. I could easily picture a scenario where the business’ noise level is not loud as far as decibels go but still travels in the quiet of the night and is very disruptive, and that may not have been apparent last year when they did their sound testing if that sound testing was done during the day. I find for myself that noises I would not even hear during the day become overwhelming noticeable in the still of the night. A couple weeks ago I was about ready to rip the ceiling fan out of my bedroom because it was making a very gentle tapping noise that made it impossible for me to sleep. If that had been the rhythmic bassline emanating from a nearby establishment I would similarly have gone nuts, even if it wasn’t objectively that loud.
At any rate, it will be interesting to see where things go.]
View full meeting details here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=860954&GUID=8D3DF330-B335-4AF6-835E-E64C04AF2E4D&Options=info|&Search=
Be the first to reply