Downtown Development District officials met with community leaders and members Thursday to discuss misconceptions that the new downtown area would allow looser drinking laws.
A Nov. 2 article in The Dallas Morning News suggested from an interviewed source that drinking laws would be loosened and bar hours extended in the Baton Rouge downtown area.
According to people involved in the Downtown Development District planning, this insinuation is misleading and untrue. Davis Rhorer, executive director of the Downtown Development District, said the meeting cleared up many misconceptions.
“At this time there is no move of foot to extend the hours of drinking,” Rhorer said. “There is a proposal to allow outdoor dining to be served in restaurants, but not for walking up and down the street with alcohol.”
He said the downtown area has a city ordinance allowing people to have alcohol directly outside of an establishment, but they will not be able to walk from bar to bar with open containers.
Members from the Campus-Community Coaltion for Change were particularly concerned about the possibility of laxed drinking regulations, and a representative attended the meeting.
Nancy Mathews, director of the CCCC, sent an e-mail to participating members of the organization after reading the article.
The article quoted Peter Couhig, president of Forum 35, a Baton Rouge nonprofit group, as saying, “Our bars close at 2 a.m., but if they keep these businesses open until 4 a.m., maybe more people would come downtown.”
The comment worried Mathews, but after meeting with officials on the planning committee, she said any concerns she had before were dissipated.
“At the meeting it was very clear that the statements made may have been exaggerated,” Mathews said. “They’re in the exploration stage of planning and I can see now that they’re working diligently to design and develop a district that’s good for everyone.”
She said the planning committee is working toward a “mixed use” environment for downtown that will not only have bars and restaurants, but also incorporate other forms of entertainment, such as art galleries, coffee shops and specialty stores.
“Very few cities want a strand of bars because they’ve found when you have a lot of alcohol outlets all located close together, crime increases and there’s more drinking, litter and vandalism,” Mathews said. “It’s very costly and it doesn’t provide the type of environment that many people would enjoy.”
Planners for the downtown area are taking tips from the booming atmosphere of Austin, Texas.
Provost Risa Palm visited the city with other University officials to observe the town and get ideas and suggestions on how to improve Baton Rouge’s downtown district.
Palm said the bar scene was a part of Austin’s atmosphere, but it was not the main attraction.
“There is certainly a younger population in Austin, but having more bars was not the main lesson we learned,” she said. “What we’ve seen is that people from Baton Rouge are ending up in Austin instead of people from Austin ending up in Baton Rouge. I think an active bar scene or a film festival are byproducts of a popular downtown, but they are not the attracting feature.”