Sobering up: Behind Madison's harder line on downtown booze

Kristin Czubkowski  —  7/23/2008 5:47 am

The year is 1998. Michael Verveer is a 30-year-old member of Madison's City Council, serving the heart of the city's downtown.

He is the articulate public voice for the many students in his district who oppose stricter controls on alcohol. When the police announce in September that they have written their first tickets under a new policy to the hosts of an off-campus party with underage drinkers, Verveer tells The Capital Times that "some of my constituents are now facing several thousands of dollars worth of fines for a crime that I don't think is that bad and that has been going on at the UW for more than four decades; namely, inviting friends over to celebrate a football game."

Alcohol is an issue, but the city's overall view on downtown is sunnier that it has been in years. The opening of the Monona Terrace Convention Center and the Kohl Center in the past year have breathed new life into the area. In July, philanthropist Jerry Frautschi announces he will donate $50 million to a new arts building to be known as the Overture Center on State Street.

Retail stores thrive as do restaurants and bars, but the police voice increasing worry about out-of-control drinking. With encouragement from the captain of the department's central district, Alcohol License Review Committee Chairman Tim Bruer floats the idea of enacting a moratorium on downtown liquor licenses. But downtown council members Verveer and Mike Staude oppose it, saying alcohol licenses should be considered on a case-by-case basis to ensure good operators. Mayor Sue Bauman shares their view and the moratorium idea fizzles.

Fast forward to 2008. Madison's economic revitalization has continued, and the face of downtown has changed as well, with many young professionals and "empty-nesters" moving in to hundreds of new condominium units. While downtown housing grew by about 70 units per year in the 1990s, according to Capitol Neighborhoods Inc. President Ledell Zellers, that number spiked to about 375 per year in the first decade of the new century.

As another part of this revitalization, though, alcohol licenses have grown by 125 percent downtown, from 57 to 128, between 1997 and 2006. With this burgeoning nightlife have come increased crime and quality of life issues, including "litter, vandalism, broken bottles, vomit and people peeing in yards," as Zellers puts it.

By 2008, the city has implemented a policy to limit the number of licenses for bars and liquor stores downtown, and the sponsor was Verveer.

Now a member of the Alcohol License Review Committee, Verveer says the arrival of more long-term downtown stakeholders forced him to rethink his position on the density plan in particular.

"When I was first elected, there really was not much of a hue and cry on the part of downtown stakeholders, be they residents or others, that we had a saturation of taverns downtown," Verveer said. "That thinking has definitely evolved."

That's true for many others besides Verveer, and the changes in the city's approach to alcohol issues downtown may just be starting.

Last month, the City Council approved several licenses with stipulations from the ALRC to limit the size of beer, malt beverage and liquor containers to make it harder for transients with drinking problems to buy them. On July 18, the license committee passed a set of guidelines that will make it harder for bartenders and liquor store employees to get licenses if they have criminal records. The City Council will take up the proposal on Aug. 5, and judging by the unanimous support at the committee level, passage is likely.

Next, Verveer and committee member Ald. Michael Schumacher want to improve the notification system for new or changed alcohol licenses. The committee currently sends out postcards about new licenses to neighbors within 300 feet of the establishment and will always ask potential license holders to get in contact with the council member from that district. The system does not alert neighbors to license changes such as the addition of an outdoor patio, though, and neighbors outside of the 300-foot radius are not regularly informed of new or changed licenses.

The committee could also potentially look into revising its system for disciplining problem bar and restaurant owners, Schumacher said. The committee now uses a complicated 200-plus point scale for assessing discipline, and Schumacher wants to focus it on a smaller number of violations such as underage drinking and over-serving that cause the greatest number of problems.

Verveer is not the only politician whose thinking on downtown alcohol issues has evolved in the past few years. The makeup of the Alcohol License Review Committee itself is a sign of how Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's views on alcohol enforcement have changed.

The mayor, who appoints the members of the committee with council approval, was quoted in 2003 as saying the ALRC needed to "loosen up" when it came to granting liquor licenses to music venues. That was the year Cieslewicz was first elected, and his first nominations to the committee included both a musician, Jan Wheaton, and Tom Powell, who had a Ph.D. in music.

Five years and a few alcohol-fueled Halloween melees later, Cieslewicz appointed members he thought could address the balance between a "vibrant nightlife" and diverse downtown residents. The new members include Dr. Pamela Bean, who works in addiction research for Rogers Memorial Hospital in Oconomowoc, and Capitol Neighborhoods member Chet Gerlach.

Cieslewicz cautioned against seeing the appointments as simple switches from a lenient committee to a strict one, saying the changes reflect different goals for the committee and the evolution of downtown.

"We've got two good things happening at once. We have a more vibrant nightlife than ever before and we also have more people living downtown than ever before and more people from different backgrounds," Cieslewicz said in a recent interview. "Those two things, to some extent they can come into conflict and they have to be managed."

Gerlach, also a member of the Association of Wisconsin Tourism Attractions, agreed with that mindset, adding that his primary interest was encouraging "responsible owners of restaurants and bars" and discouraging a culture of binge drinking and alcohol excess or abuse.

"I think that a vibrant nightlife and making downtown Madison a fun place for people to go is something that's very important to me," he said. "I just think quite frankly that abusive drinking makes for a less vibrant nightlife. Inebriated people walking down the streets and committing crimes and vomiting on the streets does not make, in my mind, for a vibrant nightlife."

Not everyone is happy about the proposals that are coming.

Downtown bar owner Hawk Schenkel, who runs Hawk's Bar & Grill at 425 State St., said the ALRC has been more "liberal-minded" toward licenses in past years. While he is a supporter of Cieslewicz, he said the recent changes in members and policy were a political response to the "overreaction" of some residents.

"You want to build a downtown, but yet you want to restrict it. You want to regulate it before it happens," he said. "What happens is, you want to get a liquor license, and they, the ALRC, typically assume that you will be a bad apple before you actually are, which is the wrong thinking and it's not fair and it hurts business."

Schumacher said the proposed changes are not a crackdown on Madison's alcohol licenses, but rather a better system for managing them, including working with licensed establishments on some of the policies and rewarding best practices. But Schenkel said the recent changing of the guard on the ALRC led to swift changes that many license holders were unprepared for.

"All of a sudden some bars started to be kind of squeezed a little bit when they hadn't been in the past. It was obvious. And that's a good thing," he said. "But what happens typically with city staff is they overreact quickly and without any warning, and bars or any other business get penalized for not knowing it's coming."

Many downtown residents have made their collective voice heard through Capitol Neighborhoods Inc., which has become a major player in city policies toward downtown and has led the push for stricter alcohol controls.

While alcohol and quality-of-life issues have always been important to the association -- it was in favor of the 1998 license moratorium as well -- Zellers said the growth of the association with the downtown and its formation of an Alcohol Issues Committee in 2005 helped the group focus its efforts.

Not all downtown residents are convinced there has been a surge in alcohol-related problems downtown. Longtime resident Dan Ross, for example, said "I hear from other people, 'Oh, it's terrible,' but it's hard to gauge because some people are from neighborhoods where nothing ever happens."

But Zellers said the success of the association and its Alcohol Issues Committee has been due to its focus on data and not just anecdotes.

The committee pulled together academic studies and reports and created fact sheets regarding the relationship between alcohol and crime. According to one fact sheet, more than 70 percent of both victims and suspects in Police Sector 403, which includes State Street, have likely used alcohol. The Central District, which covers the downtown and part of the near east side, also has a disproportionate number of batteries and substantial batteries, disturbances and fights. A police report released in 2004 showed that the city spent a minimum of $1.37 million on alcohol-related crime per year, not including follow-up on cases by detectives and other police workers.

Zellers said the increased concern with crime citywide in recent years may have brought more attention to the drain of police resources downtown when the bars close and put pressure on the city's alcohol license committee to do more about downtown bars

"I would speculate that also has had an impact -- the voice of other residents in the city being concerned about having a police presence in their area, too," she said.

Verveer also cited a string of downtown violent crimes such as muggings as another factor that brought alcohol issues downtown to his attention.

But bar owner Dick Lyshek of Ram Head Rathskeller at 303 N. Henry St. said the focus of the city has been more on the victims of these crimes -- college students -- than on the crimes themselves. Focusing on college students' drinking, he said, is a "politically easy" move that detracts from bigger problems in the downtown such as gang activity and problems with some of the transient population.

"There have been drunken college kids in the downtown area for 150 years, and now all of a sudden we're seeing a spike in serious muggings and violence," he said. "Something else has changed and to create a lot of hysteria about alcohol problems downtown is really kind of a smoke and mirrors distraction away from more serious problems."

Observers also say the city's greater scrutiny of alcohol issues has to do with the evolution of the Alcohol License Review Committee in the past few years.

Before Cieslewicz removed him from the committee in 2003, Bruer had been on it for two decades and was widely seen as its central figure. Ald. Schumacher, who was appointed to the committee in 2007, said Bruer's absence created a vacuum, and that few members understood all the facets of state alcohol law and the committee's own complicated discipline system.

Schumacher said Bruer was a "Lone Ranger" kind of figure who did well at solving crises but didn't leave behind a clear enforcement process that others could pick up quickly.

The mayor's office stepped into that gap. In 2005, Cieslewicz created a position called the alcohol policy coordinator that provides additional staff help for the committee.

"At the end of the day, what we're dealing with is a volunteer group that has a lot of authority and there are a lot of tools they can use," said Joel Plant, the first alcohol policy coordinator. "License conditions, auditing of restaurants or establishments, different kinds of inspections, different kinds of disciplinary actions through our progressive discipline system. What I saw was a lot of tools and confusion about how those tools were expected to be used and a lack of use of a lot of those tools."

While Plant said his time as the alcohol policy coordinator ended up being focused on reshaping the celebration of Halloween in the city, his successor, Katherine Plominski, also said confusion seemed to be routine among committee members.

"I definitely saw the need for training" about licenses and ordinances she said, adding that she has helped committee members with research and drafting that makes work on new initiatives go faster.

"It's easier that this is my one and primary focus, instead of these other people who serve on multiple committees, who have full-time day jobs," Plominski said. "If you think about it, planning, for example, you have staff members that work only in planning on planning issues, so it would make sense that you have someone on the ALRC that is a city staff member that this is all they do."

As the ALRC moves to take a look at the notification system for new licenses and changes to existing licenses, Plant said he sees the body becoming more prominent in the community.

"I use the analogy of body building, basically," he said. "You have a muscle that you work out and if you stop using it, it atrophies a little bit. It gets weaker, but you have to start exercising it again and all of sudden it pops back up and boom, you're back at full strength. I think we're in a position now of regaining the strength."

Kristin Czubkowski  —  7/23/2008 5:47 am