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Thursday, April 5, 2007
Singing a new tune
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The car stopped several feet from the stop sign. The driver stuck her head out the window.
“Excuse me,” she yelled from across the street in downtown Lilburn.
“Y’all know who the mayor is?”
I pointed to Jack Bolton, who was standing next to me on Main Street. He, after all, is Lilburn’s mayor. And this woman could have been a nut. Things could have turned nasty real quick.
The woman, Robin Stinson, backed up and parked. She strolled over to us and asked hizzoner a question similar to several I’d asked when he and I chatted in City Hall:
“Why are you banning karaoke?”
Some deep background is in order.
Nearly 20 years ago, some officials in this former railroad town wanted residents to OK the sale of cocktails in restaurants. As a selling point, they drafted a measure that prohibits entertainment inside the city’s 6.5 square miles. It allowed liquor licenses only for businesses in which 50 percent of sales come from food.
The law’s been on the books ever since. It didn’t become a problem till February, when city officials decided to aggressively enforce it. By then, though, karaoke and other forms of entertainment had become popular at places like the Sports Fan & Grill, located off Lawrenceville Highway in a building that used to house an all-you-can-eat Chinese joint.
Of course, karaoke fans and business owners cried foul. Lilburn became the butt of jokes in Georgia and across the nation. Easy to see why.
Ban karaoke?
Nonsense.
The e-mails of outrage have ceased, but they initially poured in from Chicago, Los Angeles, Augusta and Savannah. Like Stinson, they wanted to talk to the mayor of a town that prohibits singing in bars. Lilburn became known as the town that limits fun.
“All they heard was that Lilburn banned karaoke,” said Bolton, 58, a former Lilburn councilman in his first term as mayor.
Bolton only agreed to let the Badie Tour stop by Wednesday if we didn’t poke fun. I agreed because it’s easy to make people look stupid and backward. Unfortunately, the uproar (and jokes) about a karaoke ban totally usurped the city’s original intent of having alcohol in restaurants but keeping bars out of the city limits, which would have made a lot more sense to many.
Too bad it wouldn’t have been as sexy and alarming as a karaoke ban.
Lilburn epitomizes a true bedroom community. It’s 70 percent residential and 30 percent commercial. Town leaders and apparently a majority of residents don’t want their main drag, the heartbeat of town, turned into Bar Row.
That’s their business.
If you don’t live in the city limits, pay taxes and vote, you have no dog in this fight. Be quiet. Go somewhere else and sing.
“All the market studies say we have a surplus of retail space on Lawrenceville Highway,” Bolton told me. “We have to be real careful. We don’t want bars up and down Lawrenceville Highway.”
Hindsight is like a plug nickel. But the outcry and media attention have caused Bolton to have a revelation about the handling of the situation.
The city, he acknowledged, should have been serious all along about enforcing the alcohol ordinance. He and other officials could have done a better job, too, explaining their intent before the story grew legs, before Lilburn became a news clip about small-town stupidity.
Even Bolton’s wife didn’t understand what the city was doing at first.
“It took a while,” Bolton said.
Stinson, the woman who wanted to speak to the mayor, understood the issue better after Bolton told her about the decades-old ordinance, the crackdown on violators, and that the city didn’t license bars.
She didn’t agree, though, and told Bolton so.
“That was then. This is now,” said Stinson, who recently moved into a house she owns near downtown Lilburn.
“Why not change an antiquated law?”
That might happen in some fashion. After all, there’s no law that prohibits karaoke. Only bars.
“Do we need to change our ordinance? Perhaps,” Bolton said. “Maybe we need one for restaurants and one that addresses entertainment. We’re talking to our attorney about it.
“But it won’t be done in a knee-jerk reaction.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail rbadie@ajc.com.
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