The License Commission has retreated from universally disliked ideas on limiting how much patrons can drink in Cambridge bars and restaurant, including an idea to allow only one drink every half-hour, deputy city manager Kathy Watkins said Monday to city councillors.
The preliminary drafts of updates to rules and regulations not reconsidered for a decade were shocking to business owners, their customers and city officials, and seen as so misguided that councillors called for an economic development committee meeting so they could address them with the licensers. Watkins promised that commissioners would appear.
“This is nuts,” councillor Marc McGovern said, capturing the feelings of many about the package of draft regulations. It was released to some in May, but only became widely known June 16. “I don’t even understand what it’s trying to solve.”
The commission had concerns about overconsumption in restaurants and bars that it was trying to address, Watkins said. The draft was, in her words, an attempt to suggest an approach to ending public drunkenness and ask “Is this a workable option?”
“And they’ve heard very clearly from restaurants and bars that those are not workable options,” with feedback that is already represented on the License Commission website in an annotated version of the drafts, Watkins said. It is understood that what was released wasn’t explained well. “People got a very formal red-line-looking document that I don’t think came with enough context.”
The idea of increasing restrictions, especially ones that seem punishing, puritanical and impractical, were especially galling to some as Cambridge meets a moment of World Cup watch parties with an option for 3 a.m. closings and the unheard-of freedoms of to-go cups of alcohol in designated zones.
Two representatives from Cambridge restaurants and bars – Danielle Pattavina of Momma’s Grocery & Wine and Zusammen, and Dan Totten, a former council legislative aide now at the Lamplighter brewery – gave public comment that Cambridge needed more such innovations, including bring-you-own-booze licensing, year-round patios and patios for bars; and that the proposals were complicated, unnecessary and would cut cruelly into businesses’ bottom lines and the tips that their servers relied on.
Councillors were with them.
“Many of us on the council feel like we should not be putting any additional burden on our small businesses and on our bars,” said Patty Nolan, author of one of the night’s policy orders against the proposals. She called the commission’s suggestions “onerous.”
Legislating in different directions
E. Denise Simmons agreed that the city’s “restaurants, bars and small businesses are already operating under tremendous pressure. Food costs are up, labor costs are up, utilities, rent, insurance and deliveries are all up, and many restaurants are working with very slim margins. Beverage service is one of the few areas that helps them stay viable,” Simmons said, and in “some ways they’re overregulated.”
“It’s been really nice being around the city for the last few weeks, and I feel like we should make things easier, not harder,” vice mayor Burhan Azeem said.
Officials were confused by the need to address overserving when there are mechanisms in place to prevent it (including training requirements) or punish it (including being called in by the commission for hearings, suspensions or loss of licensing). They also had concerns about a city where officials for different bodies were legislating in starkly opposite directions.
Another order Monday looked for ways to make later closing hours and more outdoor drinking permanent, which came on the heels of a June 9 roundtable about how to keep the economic engine of Kendall Square thriving – and part of the answer then too was more fun, rather than being a city that “rolls up the sidewalks at 7 o’clock at night.” Azeem was author of the Monday order, which was co-sponsored by mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, McGovern and councillor Ayah Al-Zubi, continuing a theme Azeem and McGovern expressed at the roundtable.
Commissioners’ concerns
McGovern said there had been frustration over the years. “This has been a sticking point, where the council often wants to move in a certain direction or do something and then the License Commission – because the council has no oversight over the License Commission and even the manager has little oversight over the License Commission – we kind of feel sometimes that we are butting heads.”
The council has more collaboration with staff in departments such as Community Development, while with licensing “there was this disconnect,” Siddiqui said.
It’s not the first time the commission would have acted on a worldview formed by the hermetic concerns of its membership: a chair, the police commissioner and the fire chief. In April, ahead of the World Cup, the commission feared an invasion of violent soccer hooligans. In May, members stopped a Gen Korean BBQ House seeking to open in Harvard Square over the model of letting customers grill at their table, which the chain allows nationwide. The commission went to war with a North Cambridge restaurant that set out tea light candles in 2018, despite restaurants around Greater Boston using candles without a problem. Fire department officials said their fears stemmed from a fatal fire that broke out June 10, 1990, in Cambridge’s former Howard Johnson’s. That fire resulted from a propane tank.
Modernizing board makeup
The dispute happened to arrive on a night the city manager introduced a yearlong review and modernization initiative for Cambridge’s boards and commissions, and Watkins suggested that the draft proposals to update regulations were rolled out poorly because of the makeup of the License Commission.
“Three-member boards are very challenging in terms of operations because it means that you can’t have a conversation with two other members at the same time because you have an open meeting violation,” Watkins said. Though the membership format is set by the state, which would complicate changes such as growing board membership to five, “we’ve talked over the years about would it be helpful to have more members [with] different perspectives.”
Siddiqui said the commission’s full draft included ideas she could support, such as stocking test strips for tampered drinks, but that others showed how there was more communication needed and to “ensure that the liquor license changes we end up with are reflective of local needs.”
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