Property owners on Lower Greenville got snookered. They agreed last year to new regulations governing late-night hours for bars. They didn't agree to get put out of business.
Chris Gash
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They were snookered by the neighborhoods. I should love that, because I love neighborhoods. But, you know, snookered is snookered. In the long run this particular snooker may even be a good thing, but that still doesn't make it right.
I have been talking to people for two weeks about this. They're all scared to death of City Hall and lawsuits, so they all wanted to talk on a no-names basis — even the neighborhood people.
The story they tell is pretty consistent. The difference is that the neighborhood people are proud of themselves for it and the property owners are monumentally pissed off.
It happened like this: The neighborhoods went to the property owners originally and asked them to go along with a rezoning effort aimed at getting rid of the "bad operators." Only the bad operators.
That meant the plastic-cup buck-a-drink puke bars wreaking havoc on surrounding neighborhoods. City council member Angela Hunt promised to release millions of dollars in street improvement money for the area if the property owners lined up behind a major rezoning aimed only at the puke people.
So the good guys agreed. In spite of grave misgivings, the principal property owners endorsed a plan by which every business on Lower Greenville that wanted to stay open after midnight would be required to go before a city board to get something called a "special use permit," or SUP.
The SUP process says this to a bar owner: "Yeah, you have a proper lease. Yeah, you have the right liquor license. Sure, you pay your taxes and your fees. And, yes, the law allows you to stay open until 2 a.m. But we say now that you also have to have an SUP to stay open until 2."
To get an SUP, you have to go before the city plan commission and maybe also the city council. If they don't like you, you don't get the SUP. If you don't get the SUP, the city can fine you $2,000 every single time they catch you doing business after midnight.
But Hunt and fellow council member Pauline Medrano, a coauthor of the new regs for Lower Greenville, promised the property owners that only the bad guys would have trouble with the city. That way the good guys would get the benefit of all that money Hunt would release to fix up the street, and the process would cleanse the neighborhood of puke, which should be a good thing.
So here comes the snooker. The property owners vow to me that this was a complete snooker, as far as they were concerned. They did not see it coming. The neighborhoods agree it may have been sort of a snooker, but they tell me it was a snooker for the good. Hunt wouldn't talk to me about it on the record, but I am convinced she was not in on the snooker.
You're a tenant. You have a bar. You get your special use permit. You are ready to rock and roll, right? Oh, wrong! Because the minute you get your SUP, along comes the city to say, "You now have new zoning."
You say, "Nah, not really. Same old zoning, just a little old SUP saying I can keep using the old zoning I already had."
City says: "An SUP is new zoning."
You say: "OK, if you say so. It's new zoning. So what?"
City says: "With new zoning, you have to get a new certificate of occupancy" ("CO" in City Hall parlance).
Listen. If you are a business in a building more than 20 years old, the words "new CO" uttered by a Dallas city official are equivalent to "I hate you, and I'm carrying your baby."
Here comes the man in the white car with his ticket book. Electrical outlets four inches too low? Ticket. Old-style breaker box? Ticket. Square-footage of bathrooms, ceiling height in bathrooms, flooring material in bathrooms, ticket, ticket, ticket. Now, show me your grease trap.
Property owners told me last week that when their tenants began to scream, the city said, "All right, we'll back off on the CO if you back off on the SUP."
In other words, give up the SUP, agree to close at midnight, and we'll forget about the new CO. You can keep your old grease trap. Oh, that was the lady's room? Well, whatever. You're cool. Just shut 'er down at the witching hour.
One of the few people with enough nerve to discuss this with me on the record was Theresa O'Donnell, director of the Dallas Department of Sustainable Development and Construction (a department whose name I have always thought should be lengthened to "Sustainable Development, Construction and Green Transit-Oriented Walkability").
O'Donnell said the version I got from the property owners was not wrong. "I think it's easy to see why they would understand that," she said.
But she sort of suggested they might want to keep their heads down instead of whining to reporters about it. All of a sudden, I understood why everybody had been so terribly off the record with me. I'd be scared, too.
