An emergency resolution now before the D.C. Council would undo a five-year-old legislative mistake that is preventing hopeful restaurant owners from obtaining liquor licenses.
There is a provision in the D.C. Code known as the 400-foot rule, a statute that bans alcohol sales inside 400 feet of a school. Within the provision should be an exemption for liquor licensees near schools based in commercially zoned buildings — as many of the city’s 37 charter schools are today.
But the exception was accidentally deleted in 2001 when the 400-foot rule was transferred from the D.C. Municipal Regulations to the code. And with the proliferation of charter schools in all matter of commercial buildings throughout Washington, restaurateurs are left with a waning number of potential locations in the city’s hottest neighborhoods, backers of the resolution say.
“Bubbling talk of development is all over the place,” said Jeff Coudriet, director of operations with the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration. “It’s definitely a pressingissue here. People are waiting to apply.”
Coudriet said the problem is particularly apparent along 14th Street in Columbia Heights, near 14th Street and Florida Avenue Northwest and, soon enough, in the H Street Northeast corridor. It hasn’t come to “push comes to shove yet,” he said, but it’s only a matter of time.
“The restaurant association would certainly support the liberalization of that rule,” said Andrew Kline, general counsel with the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, of the 400-foot rule.
The resolution simply re-establishes the exemption. Without it, according to the legislative language, “these license applications cannot be approved and thus the community will be deprived of their services.”
The measure was introduced by Ward 6 Council Member Sharon Ambrose.
