Trouble at The Office
Stock car fans’ plans to party at a Palmerston North bar led to the event being curtailed because there was no liquor licence for an outdoor bar area that should not have been there anyway.
Licensing inspector Lynne Kroll was alerted to the problems at The Office in Main St by Facebook advertising in early February.
She went to check out comments that there had been a major revamp of the outdoor area to allow more people to fit in and enjoy a second bar that had been installed.
Kroll had to tell the operators the event could not go ahead in the extended yard because it was outside the area covered by the bar’s liquor licence.
And when she alerted the city council’s building inspectors, they found no application had been made for a building consent for the work that had been done.
Owner Martin Wong has since engaged an architect to correct the building issues, but his application for an extended liquor licence has revealed another problem – a neighbouring hotel complaining about noise.
The Cobb owner Ricky Quirk has objected to the licence application being extended because he feared it would create even worse noise problems for guests trying to sleep at the hotel next door.
He said hotel guests were giving the place bad reviews because of noise from The Office. Some left in the middle of the night, some demanded refunds, and the problem was undermining the viability of the business.
Kroll had a summary of 11 noise complaints received since August 2017 about noise between 10.30pm and 1.30am, but in only four of those cases did noise control officers record noise above the 70 decibels allowed in the central city. Quirk’s lawyer Peter Brosnahan has asked the District Licensing Committee at a hearing on July 11 to decline the licence application.
‘‘The applicant has a history of noncompliance.
‘‘He says he is going to build a structure to solve all the problems, but has no expert evidence about how effective it’s going to be.’’
Brosnahan said it was premature to consider the licence application before Wong had his affairs in order.
The fall-back position was that if the licence was extended, there should be a requirement to turn off the music in the garden bar at 11pm.
Wong’s representative Chris Hince said enclosing the extended area had taken ‘‘no small amount of time and money’’.