The Fenty administration is backing a plan that would allow more restaurants and bars along the trendy U Street Corridor, but mixed signals from city bureaucrats have thrown business owners and residents into chaos.
Under D.C. law, bars and restaurants can only take up 25 percent of the neighborhoods along 14th and U streets and down Florida Avenue. Community and business leaders have proposed doubling the cap. The city’s planning office says it is convinced and will lobby to have the zoning commission approve a new cap.
Last week, though, the District’s consumer agency announced that the area was at capacity for bars and restaurants and that no more licenses would be handed out. That threw things into turmoil. Blog sites erupted, business leaders sent angry messages and even Fenty ally Jack Evans, Councilman for Ward 2, denounced the administration.
“We were not made aware of this in advance, nor were the businesses, nor was the community,” Evans said at the time. “So everybody has a right to be angry about this.”
Earlier this week, consumer officials dispatched a letter trying to clear up the “confusion.”
City Planning Director Harriet Tregoning told the Washington Examiner it was all a big misunderstanding.
“We agreed with the [residents] but we had to document the current status for the zoning commission,” she said. “We’ve been working on the issue and we expect to have a text amendment by July.”
But the first announcement already scotched at least one restaurant. David Winer, owner of Logan Tavern and three other D.C. restaurants, said he walked away from a new venture because of the first cap announcement.
“I can’t go and spend $700,000 and not be sure that I would get the license,” Winer said last week. The District, he said, “is a big, sprawling bureaucracy that doesn’t always know what’s up.”
The cap was designed to protect the neighborhood from drunk revelers and to preserve its arts scene. But many residents say it’s out of date.
“Longtime residents of this neighborhood have always said, ‘We have no places to go,'” said Khalid Pitts, who runs a wine shop called Cork, lives in the area and who helped draft the recommendation.
