By Joe Dignan
February 12, 2004, San Francisco Bay Times
URL: http://pages.sbcglobal.net/dignanj/doc/040212d.htm
If San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors had its way, many of this city’s bars would be open until 4 a.m. In a resolution authored by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose district includes North Beach, the board voted 8 to 3 on Tuesday to ask the state legislature, which controls bar closing times, to modernize laws related to alcohol closing hours.
What they mean by that is that the Board is adding its assent to an idea put forward by San Francisco Assemblyman Mark Leno that the city’s bars, with lots of potential restrictions, should be able stay open until four.
Why? The city’s nightlife advocates and club owners are getting desperate over the declining attendance at San Francisco’s once-fabled nightspots. Attorney Mark Rennie, a lawyer for about 25 of the city’s clubs and bars, says that the vast majority of his clients are in distress. “I’m surprised more of them haven’t gone bankrupt,” he said.
According to Rennie, San Francisco’s hotel occupancy rates are down, way down, from their 88 percent peak in 1999 to 63 percent now. Even the cabbies are hurting. According to Naiomi Little, the head of the city’s taxi commission, in the first six months of 2000 SF’s cabs got a total of about 2.47 million radio calls. Last year in the same period, it wasn’t even 2 million, a decline of 20 percent.
Is it the economy, or is something else going on here? Rennie says it’s mainly something else. He says that it used to be that gay men from Los Angeles were the largest single block of visitors to San Francisco, and they came up here to go out. Now, he says, they’ve stopped coming.
“Gay men are the proverbial canaries in the mineshaft of the tourist industry,” Rennie said, “They lead the rest of the business by five to six years. It’s hard to believe they’d rather stay in LA, but they are. And what about Miami and New Orleans?” he said. “We’re getting killed.”
“We need to put the edge back onto San Francisco’s entertainment scene,” said SF Entertainment Commission Chairman Terrance Alan, at the Board’s City Services Committee hearing last week when they took up Peskin’s resolution. “We need to regain some of the luster.” Tourism is San Francisco’s number one industry.
Alan says that San Francisco is almost alone among major tourist destinations where the bars close at two. Many other states, Texas, New York, New Jersey and even West Virginia allow major cities to sell liquor after 2 a.m.
At the City Services Committee hearing the supervisors, Bevan Dufty, Fiona Ma and Michela Alioto-Pier, heard from about twenty advocates for the plan, and three dissenters from the Potrero Hill Boosters who say that they fear bars on Potrero Hill will be open late.
Peskin said that the plan, if it is implemented, won’t affect neighborhood places. “I wouldn’t want my neighborhood bar open until 4 a.m. either,” he said. The Entertainment Commission’s Alan said that in order to be allowed to stay open, first bars will have to be in areas which are zoned for late night entertainment, and then will face a public hearing when they apply for a late night operation permit with the Entertainment Commission. “It won’t be automatic,” said Alan.
The advocates also maintain that late closing actually decreases the risk of liquor-related traffic accidents, Peskin said. “It doesn’t seem to make sense when you first think about it,” he said, but if bars are open later, it seems people rush to have a last drink and then immediately get in their cars. He said that, according to US Traffic Safety Administration data, the accident rate goes down as the closing time gets later.
Leno had originally suggested that the state’s five largest cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose should be able to decide when their bars close, and his aides said there was some interest in the idea, but he got about 900 e-mails from San Francisco constituents supporting the idea, and much fewer from the other cities. So he is limiting the bill, which he will introduce by February 20, to apply only to San Francisco.
***