BAR, MOSQUE FORCED TO BE NEIGHBORS
A conflict between zoning regulations and rules of a city board has resulted in a bar next door to a house of worship being allowed to sell beer.
What could go wrong?
The decision worries us both in the short and long runs. In the short run, we can only imagine the tension possible between Muslim worshippers who visit the Masjid Muhammad Islamic Center on Cemetery Avenue to pray five times a day — and whose Islam faith does not permit them to drink alcohol — and drunken patrons exiting Shady’s Corner bar next door.
In the long run, the decision seems to invite other alcohol-selling establishments to seek similar zonings that would allow them to open in attractive locations adjacent to other houses of worship or schools.
Currently, the city’s beer ordinance forbids bars within 500 feet of a house of worship or school. However, the specific zoning designation (urban general commercial) that the bar obtained does not come with such a restriction.
(The Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency zoning classification says such a zone is “intended for commercial and mixed-use development while creating a new or maintaining an existing urban form.” It was implemented more than a decade ago to allow for alcohol sales at places like Memorial Auditorium, which is across the street from First-Centenary United Methodist Church, and at restaurants and bars near a school like Battle Academy on Market Street.)
In their meeting Thursday, Chattanooga Beer and Wrecker Board members reversed a unanimous vote earlier this month not to allow the bar to sell beer. Members said they felt their hands were tied.
“This is a problem for us on the board,” member Dan Mayfield said.
A suit filed in Chancery Court by owners of Shady’s Corner, following the initial vote, may have forced the board’s hand.
What was particularly egregious about Thursday’s proceedings, though, was that the matter was not on the beer board’s agenda, so none of the 45 members of the adjacent mosque who were present during the board’s April 6 meeting had a chance to complain, seek a delay or work out a compromise.
When the proceedings began, board member Ron Smith made a “motion to reconsider” the earlier vote, which occurred with no discussion among members. It passed, and eventually the earlier vote was reversed.
“There have been people everywhere and about 50 to 70 cars all over the streets,” the mosque’s imam, Hammad El-Ameen, told Times Free Press reporter Barry Courter by phone after the meeting. “Big screen TVs and loudspeakers. How can you worship with that going?”
The mosque has been in place for almost 40 years, is home to 200 to 250 families with children and is in use seven days a week, its officials said.
“This is already a struggling neighborhood dealing with drugs and alcohol,” El-Ameen said at the meeting earlier this month, “and this is insulting to put something like this here.”
The bar, which had been given a state license to sell alcohol, opened earlier this month.
Although Thursday’s vote was to grant the beer permit, resolving the conflict between zoning and beer board regulations was on the minds of several members, including Mayfield, who voted in the
5-2 majority to allow the permit, and Vince Butler and Cynthia Coleman, who voted to deny it.
Butler, on Friday, said when Chattanooga City Council members voted to rezone the property, they were told it would be a restaurant. Until the meeting earlier this month, that’s what beer board members expected.
“What it looks like is happening now is [the bar owners] are using the UGC zoning to get around a 500-foot restriction from a church,” he said in an interview. “As a Christian, I’m concerned about that. Today it was a mosque; tomorrow it might be a Baptist church.”
But Butler said he is concerned not only with the bar’s proximity to a house of worship but also what he said were city ordinances that call — vaguely — for adequate parking. The business has 10 parking spaces in the back, but the minimal street parking in the area must be shared with residents, mosque attendees and patrons of other businesses.
“It’s going to create a situation that’s set up for a bad incident happening,” he said. If a conflict occurs, “there’s a strong likelihood of it exploding into something much bigger.”
To us, a bar next to a center where worshippers are in and out all day and evening, with and without children, is different from the examples offered in the creation of the UGC zoning.
Almost all events where alcohol is served at Memorial Auditorium are held at a time when members of FirstCentenary Church are not in session next door. Similarly, bars near Battle Academy are not busy when students are in school. Further, alcohol sales at Memorial Auditorium are not dispensed as in a bar where patrons are having one drink after another. Drinks at the auditorium are generally consumed before and during breaks in shows.
We urge the city, county and planners to put their heads together to figure out a better alternative to the conflicting rules that caused this potential powder keg to be lit.