You might soon have more nightlife options in Clifton if neighborhood groups get their way.
Cincinnati City Manager Harry Black today filed a memo with Cincinnati City Council and the mayor’s office regarding an application from Clifton Town Meeting — the neighborhood’s community council — and the Clifton Business and Professional Association seeking to establish a community entertainment district along Ludlow Avenue. A map of the proposed district shows it would also include the area around Good Samaritan Hospital and a northern section of Burnet Woods.
The two groups, together called Clifton Community LLC, want to create the district in order to attract new businesses and retain existing ones, according to the ordinance Black filed.
The CED designation, which is conferred by the city, allows the state of Ohio’s Division of Liquor Control to create an additional pool of up to 15 liquor licenses for restaurants within the bounds of the district. Those licenses, which allow for liquor to be served on premises and allow beer and wine carry out, must stay within the district. They’re also much cheaper — $2,344 — than the extremely limited number of licenses the state allows a city. Scarcity can drive the cost of those licenses well into the five figures when one goes up for sale.
A 2015 proposal creating a new CED in OTR was somewhat controversial, with some opponents saying the move would create too many bars in the neighborhood. The city eventually gave the OK for the proposal, which essentially split OTR’s CED into two separate districts — doubling the number of CED-created liquor licenses available there.
Mayor John Cranley has generally been supportive of CEDs.
“This is about whether there should be a cap on liquor licenses or not,” Cranley said in 2015 about the downtown and OTR districts. “Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let the market determine which bars should succeed and fail.”
Ohio is one of 17 states that limits the number of liquor licenses a city can receive. Municipalities are limited to one per 2,000 residents. The state’s cap on liquor licenses is a holdover from the country’s immediate post-Prohibition years, when lawmakers tried to navigate a compromise between the country’s distaste for its alcohol ban with the lingering political power of the Temperance Movement.
The license caps have remained stubbornly lodged in the state’s legal code due to the vested interests of distributors and current license holders who have big money at stake in the system as it stands. If the number of licenses in the state goes up as the cap is eliminated, those who hold licenses now worth tens of thousands of dollars could see their value deflate significantly. They would also face a rush of new business competition.
But supporters of generating more liquor licenses say the caps present a big barrier to small businesses looking to get their start.
That’s where CEDs come in. They allow a city to get more liquor licenses than normally stipulated under state law, but only in specific neighborhoods. Cincinnati’s first CEDs were two districts at The Banks created in 2008. In 2010, council made it much cheaper for applicants looking to revitalize the city’s neighborhoods to apply for a CED, lowering the cost from $15,000 to $1,500.
Since that time, the city has named 11 more districts in Northside, Over-the-Rhine, Walnut Hills, Pleasant Ridge, CUF, Madisonville, East Price Hill, Short Vine, College Hill and 3 East, a district encompassing East Side neighborhoods East End, Columbia Tusculum and Linwood.
Cincinnati City Council must approve the district designation, after which the state would decide whether to issue the licenses. Consideration of the Clifton Community Entertainment District is set for council’s Jan. 24 meeting.
This article appears in Jan 17-24, 2018.
