HELL’S KITCHEN — The days of public “shouting matches” between bar owners and their neighbors may be numbered.
Community Board 4’s Quality of Life Committee will no longer hear noise and other complaints about bars and restaurants in in the neighborhood, as part of its rebranding as the Arts, Culture, Education and Street Life (ACES) Committee, board chairwoman Delores Rubin said.
Those concerns will now be handled by the board office and the Business License and Permits Committee, which already reviews liquor license applications, she noted.
“We think that there’s a lot more that helps the quality of life for our community than just dealing with things to complain about,” Rubin explained. “We recognized the committee itself had become extremely bogged down by complaints about bars and restaurants.”
Within the past year or so, the Quality of Life Committee spent hours at a time addressing residents’ complaints about neighborhood watering holes, including places like Alfie’s and Rudy’s Bar & Grill on Ninth Avenue and Bottoms Up and Vodka Soda on West 46th Street.
The revamp will let the ACES Committee focus on issues like education that had previously been sidelined, Rubin said.
The restructuring won’t leave residents without a forum to voice their concerns about local businesses, she noted.
The CB4 office will do more of the “heavy lifting” involved in solving disputes between owners and residents — from relaying complaints to owners to finding out what they plan to do to resolve perceived problems — before both sides meet to air their grievances, Rubin said.
Bar and restaurant owners often heard residents’ complaints for the first time at Quality of Life Committee meetings, leading to “awkward situations” that were difficult to resolve on the spot, she explained.
“I think it’s more important that the conversations are happening in a calm environment that’s proactive in its focus to get things done," Rubin said. "It allows for a more amicable way to deal with things without it being a shouting match."
The public will still be able to voice concerns at Business License and Permits Committee meetings when problems are ongoing or when it is deemed necessary, she added.
“I think it is important… to bring all parties together, and I think that will happen on occasion,” Rubin said. “But I do think a lot of times, things may blow up more than they need to when that initial contact is happening in that realm.”
