The day after the Portland city council tripled an Old Port bar fee that helps pay for overtime area police, a group of angry bar owners gathered at Brian Boru on Center Street and decided to hire a lawyer to sue the city for the decade-old method Portland uses to restrict partying in the Old Port. It’s a battle some bar owners have foretold for years and one that even Portland’s attorney isn’t sure the city can win.
The bar owners’ threatened lawsuit boils down this month’s fee-hike tug-of-war to a basic question that has long dogged the city: is the Old Port overlay district legal?
The Old Port overlay district was created by the city council in 1996 to tame rapidly growing nightlife in the densest commercial area of the neighborhood. Bars in the district must obtain a city liquor license as well as a state liquor license to operate, follow rules governing proximity to other bars, and pay an operational fee called the “bar-stool fee.” At the time, the district was drawn to encompass all of the most popular bars in the snarl of city blocks around Fore and Wharf streets, creating a zone shaped like a jigsaw puzzle piece, with ragged edges including some blocks and avoiding others. Generally, bars in the overlay district are some of the most lucrative in town thanks in part to the same clustering that fosters nighttime naughtiness there (see “The Freakin’ Weekend,” by Sara Donnelly, February 15).
For the privilege of boozing up the tens of thousands of tourists and locals who visit the Old Port every year, overlay bar owners have historically played along with the district’s extra rules. But last week’s tripling of the bar-stool fee proved to be too much, too fast. Some bar owners say the fee is an unfair tax on a targeted group of business owners.
Revolution
Laurence Kelley, an owner of Brian Boru, compared last week’s gathering of overlay bar owners to the Boston Tea Party.
“We’re all completely united in going after this thing and these city councilors,” says Kelley, whose bar will have to pay $2220 in bar-stool fees in 2007, up from $666 this year. “We [at Brian Boru] are completely outraged because we have nothing to do with the Old Port, we’re blocks away from it, and we never have police calls. But I would pay my fair share if every liquor license in this city is charged.” Neither bars outside the Old Port or restaurants anywhere in the city pay the bar-stool fee under the current plan.
The bar-stool fee, also known as the bar-occupancy fee or the seat tax, was created 10 years ago, along with the overlay district, to pay for overtime police officers on rowdy weekend nights in the Old Port. It is calculated by multiplying the bar’s maximum legal occupancy by the per-seat fee set by the city. The council raised the per-seat fee from $4.50 to $15 last week, which means Gritty McDuff’s on Fore Street, for example, had its total bar-stool fee jump from $1125 in 2006 to $3750 in 2007.
