The bars are still open after 3

They deferred a vote on the much dreaded ABO overhaul. It's still not great. But it does sound like certain aspects of the rules under consideration are moving in a better direction.

The ordinance has been in the works since former Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration. Landrieu’s controversial proposal included a provision requiring that all businesses with alcoholic beverage permits install cameras linked to the city’s Real-Time Crime Monitoring Center and another that allowed for the emergency suspension of a permit, without a hearing by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. That proposal was dropped last year, before Mayor LaToya Cantrell and a new council took office. 

The current City Council revisited it in November 2018 and introduced a new ordinance the next month. That proposal called for cameras at certain “nuisance bars” as an alternative to license revocation and kept the language on emergency suspensions. Since then, it has been rewritten and repeatedly amended to address the concerns of the hospitality industry and local culture advocates. 

When taking into account a package of proposed amendments introduced on Thursday, the new rules would be much looser than originally proposed, meeting many of the demands from advocates and workers. 

But we're still not quite there. Commenters at the meeting still aren't happy with a provision that would give ABO the power to revoke a bar's permit simply by declaring an "emergency."  There is still a bizarre prohibition against issuing licenses to anyone convicted of a felony within the past five years. (Although this might actually be a state level problem depending on how we interpret things.) 

The good news is they seem like they've removed something I was especially worried about when this process got started. 

The currently proposed ordinance also omits many of the more controversial aspects of the ordinance as introduced in December. One example was a “neighborhood compatibility” section that stated that if five or more residents within a half-mile of a bar submitted written complaints, that bar would be presumed to be a “nuisance” or “detrimental to the health, safety, and welfare of the community.”

They can't just shut you down because some Nextdoor freaks got together and did a letter writing campaign.  So there's some progress.  But let's keep arguing.