Evanston restaurants could serve alcohol until 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights under an ordinance being introduced at tonight’s City Council meeting.
Alcohol can be served only until 1 a.m. under the current law.
The ordinance would extend the hours for sale of liquor in downtown Evanston from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., Sunday through Thursday, and to 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday.
“The main point is that there are several businesses in Evanston whose customers don’t want to go home at 12 or 1 and want to stay until 2 or 3,” said Jonathan Perman, executive director of the Evanston Chamber of Commerce. Perman said he would prefer a stronger ordinance that extends the hours to 3 a.m. every night.
Some members of the business community said they supported changing the ordinance.
One problem with the current ordinance is that people, many of them NU students, will leave Evanston bars and drive to other locations, said Dan Kelch, owner of Lulu’s, 626 Davis St.
Though his own restaurant would remain unaffected by the new ordinance because it does not rely primarily on alcohol sales for profits, Kelch said he thought the change would benefit the city as a whole.
“The community’s changing,” Kelch said. “It’s becoming more urban. (The old ordinance) is looked at as being inappropriate for Evanston in the year 2002.”
Both Kelch and Troy Thiel, president of the Evanston Small Business Association, said the longer hours would keep business in Evanston. “It’s getting us in line with our competition,” Thiel said.
Bridget Lane, executive director of EvMark, a nonprofit organization that promotes the downtown area, also said the ordinance would improve evening business.
“It allows us to compete better with restaurants and entertainment venues in Chicago,” Lane said, adding that she hoped the new ordinance would continue the trend of making Evanston more appealing for consumers.
“We welcome the changes in the last couple years that have made the downtown a little hipper,” Lane said.
The City Council also will vote Tuesday on whether to extend metered parking hours downtown. If the new hours are passed, meters will have to be paid between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., a four-hour extension from the current period of 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Ald. Arthur Newman (1st) said the parking ordinance would discourage employees from taking parking spaces that could be used by customers.
“The reason we’re extending hours is to create turnover,” Newman said.
Also, the city will gain income from the extra four hours of parking tolls each day. Perman, who said he expected the ordinance to pass, said the business community agreed to support the parking-meter extension to avert another food-and-beverage tax hike.
The ordinance passed the parking committee easily, with Thiel being the only parking committee member to vote against sending it to the council.
“Customers will face another cost to coming to Evanston to do business,” he said.
When the new garage at Sherman Plaza is built, there might be enough off-street parking for customers, Thiel said. But until that time, there might be a lack of spaces, regardless of meter hours.
“The interim time is a dangerous time for downtown,” he said. “The onus is really on the city and the business community to maintain the surface meter spots for the customers.”
