City Hall cracks down on trouble spots

Numerous bars under scrutiny

The Mingle Room on Rideau Street is the third business to close in Ottawa in the last year after being targeted by the city government and more could be hearing from councillors and inspectors before long.

When the sign went up on the door this week saying the night spot was closing “due to some changes,” the Mingle Room joined the Vibe Lounge in Hintonburg and the Suya Spot off Merivale Road on the ash heap — their staff unemployed, their landlords looking for new tenants.

All three drew complaints from their neighbours. All three were linked to deadly shootings outside their walls, though it wasn’t always obvious just how. All three closed under pressure from their landlords, who were themselves under pressure from the city.

The city is an enforcement octopus.

In the bylaw department, health inspectors and fireprevention inspectors are the biggies. The police and buildingcode inspectors play a role, too. The heaviest threats come from provincial liquor-licence enforcers, whom the city doesn’t command but with whom it communicates regularly. With so many regulations to choose from, a councillor can paint a target on a business if he or she wants to.

“We don’t do it. Ninety-nine per cent of businesses comply with the regulations we have,” said Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury. “We don’t get requests for enforcement or complaints.”

But the Mingle Room was known for noise, for allegations that patrons would spill out and roar their cars up and down Rideau Street in the wee hours, and for violating the city’s anti-hookah bylaw, he said. When 25-year-old football star Ashton Dickson was shot outside in June, after an argument that started inside, the city picked up its enforcement efforts.

The pressure point Fleury found for the Mingle Room was zoning: The place was a nightclub in a building where the zoning also doesn’t allow one. Its sign called the place a “bar and lounge,” it opened only at 6 or 7 p.m. and stayed open till last call, the only things on its menu online are drinks (and bottle service!), and staff ID’d people at the door. It was licensed as a restaurant but to all appearances it was a club.

The city pointed out the Mingle Room’s zoning problem to the landlords, who’d be responsible for the penalties, and zap.

Fleury has his eye on 10 more businesses in his ward, he said. Many of them are in the ByWard Market and, like the Mingle Room, are licensed as restaurants but seem to be operating mainly as bars.

Provincial liquor rules say a licence can be suspended or revoked from a place that’s harming its community, though the language is vague and not very often used.

Fleury would like more oneday and one-week suspensions handed out.

Losing the right to sell alcohol would devastate most places. Knowing that, most enforcement agencies, including the alcohol commission and Ottawa’s health unit, operate on the premise that business owners want to comply with the rules. They give a lot of warnings before shutting a place down.

But sometimes the complaints pile up.

“I said to him, ‘How hard do you want the police to come down on you?’ ” said Coun. Riley Brockington, recounting on Tuesday his pivotal conversation with the Suya Spot’s landlord last year.

Twenty-six-year-old Abdi Jama was found fatally shot in the parking lot of the Suya Spot’s strip mall in Carlington last September.

But that was just the last big problem.

Brockington had heard plenty of complaints about the Suya Spot when he was running for election in 2014.

“There were fire-code issues, bylaw issues, and the list went on,” he said. The Suya Spot didn’t have a liquor licence because it had been open and drawing complaints from neighbours before it applied for one, and the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario said no — though there were allegations that the place was selling booze anyway. Jama’s death brought the problems to a head, Brockington said, prompting meetings where he laid the list out to the landlord.

The place was licensed as a restaurant but it occupied a big basement space. That included a large area that was notionally for events but in practice wasn’t used that way.

“It was a hangout,” said Brockington, a place open at odd hours and often much later than most people would be looking for Nigerian barbecue.

Like the Mingle Room’s, the Suya Spot’s zoning allowed a restaurant, not a club. Brockington said so and the Suya Spot was gone within a couple of weeks.

For the Vibe Lounge on Somerset Street West, after 17-year-old Leslie Mwakio was found shot in an SUV down the street in December, the point of leverage was its liquor and food licences. Provincial regulators suspended the liquor licence and then the city made a deal with the place’s landlord to suspend the licence that let the Vibe Lounge sell food, which effectively put it out of business.

The landlord terminated the lease.

Typically a business known as a trouble spot will have attracted a whole lot of attention before a councillor decides to go after it — you very rarely get places run in button-down fashion where fights break out at two in the morning and somebody gets shot dead.

“It’s not one thing that will close a business, nor should it be,” Fleury said.

We don’t do it. Ninety-nine per cent of businesses comply with the regulations we have.