City moves forward with process of reclassifying liquor licenses

fred couzens/viewCustomers gather at the Other Side lounge within The Coffee Cup, 512 Nevada Way. It had been operating for months primarily as a bar until the city upgraded its Class C service bar license to a Class B cocktail lounge license classification on Aug. 20. Advertisement

In a move to bring liquor-serving establishments in line with their correct license classification, Al and Carri Stevens' The Coffee Cup became the first such business to be reclassified at the Aug. 20 meeting of the city's Business/Liquor License Board.

The board -- City Manager Vicki Mayes and City Clerk Pam Malmstrom with the third member, City Attorney Dave Olsen, absent -- approved a Class B cocktail lounge license that will replace the Class C service bar license that had been in effect for five years at the 512 Nevada Way establishment.

The reclassification became necessary when the Stevens remodeled a portion of their restaurant's square footage into The Other Side lounge, sort of a surfside tiki hut with a Mai Tai motif, that opened last year.

"I'm glad we got that behind us," Al Stevens said following the meeting. "It's taken a while to get through this."

Other Class C service bar businesses that will be required to be upgraded to the more expensive Class B cocktail lounge license -- Class C licenses are $450 annually, while Class B licenses are $1,200 a year -- are Milo's Best Cellars and Boulder Bowl, according to city Licensing Officer Linda Hand, who noted that the Milo's upgrade is scheduled for a Business/Liquor License meeting tomorrow.

For more than 18 months, the city has been in the process of updating its nearly 40-year-old liquor ordinance, with the first step being to bring existing businesses into compliance by mandating the correct license.

To accomplish that, the city earlier this year began inspecting all liquor-serving establishments for possible license changes. The inspection process in the past has been reactive to complaints to the board, the most recent being from Richard Assalone of Chiarelli's Restaurant and Catering at the Sept. 19, 2007, board meeting, where he asked for things to "be fair" and "on a level playing field."

"You know, Linda, going into the future, I almost think that you guys administratively in the Business License Division need to set up where you do this, where you physically do a site visit," Mayes said after the Aug. 20 meeting. "Because, now that we've done this, if we wait the way we did before, we're going to end up in the same situation we are now. So, either our Business License officer once a year needs to do a site visit ... or, alternatively, it's possible we could work with (Code Enforcement Officer) Larry Markotay and train him so he could do the site inspections for us.

"We don't want to let this go again, because people don't realize they've made this slight little change in their business operation and now they've moved into a different class of license. These aren't intentional things that happen, these are practices that have evolved over time. They've evolved to the point now they're not meeting the license requirements," Mayes said.

Whether it gets set up or not may have to wait a while since Hand retired Aug. 29, five working days after the liquor board meeting.

In addition to The Coffee Cup's reclassification, the board approved three new managers of local businesses that sell liquor after city inspections found the managers without proper authorization.

Another potential change on the horizon for the board is that typically when applications for managers and special events get submitted to the Business License Division, they come before the board for approval. But that might be changing soon, too.

"I thought that not only the approval of the managers but the approval on the special events where they're doing hard liquor, like the nonprofit ones like the Rotary and so forth," Hand said to Mayes when asked if she had any possible changes for updating the liquor law. "Those probably should be done administratively because we don't even do background checks on those."