Paying the coppers

Monday, August 20, Portland City Council will decide who covers the costs of late-night patrols. Bar owners are holding their breath.

By Noah Bruce

There’s no place like the Old Port in the summer for cop-watching. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes: the straight-backed, horse-mounted, whistle-blower (usually in pairs); the flat-footed walk-about; the fleet, pedal-pushing mountain-bike rider; even your garden variety in-car patrolman. While your average Portlander is jaded to the experience of watching a Portland Police Department cop, tourists from near and far, even Canada, come to the city to watch them congregate in their natural habitat. Sometimes tourists and natives alike become a nuisance and spur the cop into action.

In the evening, cop variety shrinks, but numbers swell, and the persistent enthusiast should be able to count six officers on foot in the Old Port on any given weekend night. The high density makes a sighting, and interaction, likely.

Every year, density of officers in the area seems to grow, and while this is great for cop-watchers (the cops keep in check the population of young punks and rowdy drunks detrimental to the business owner) this kind of police presence in the city costs money. And City Hall is getting tired of footing the bill.

“The Old Port is the beneficiary of police overtime that exceeds anywhere else,” said city councilor Karen Geraghty at the city council meeting on August 6. “Every year [business owners] ask for more and more coverage . . . We cannot deliver this kind of coverage without some kind of contribution.”

The contribution has been determined: $45,000, the cost of summer police overtime in the Old Port last year. The city has decided that $30,000 will come exclusively from the bars. The problem is figuring out

how the money should be collected, and that should be determined at city council’s August 20 meeting, a meeting that should prove cantankerous.

For starters, many bar owners feel this, like school funding, is a general fund issue. But, if it’s not going to be a general fund issue, the bar owners whose bars require little police attention begrudge paying the same as bars that host regular Friday night brawls. Then there is the overlay zone, which determines what is an Old Port bar and thus who must pay. Despite the fact that even some city councilors admit the overlay zone is unfairly drawn, the city appears bent on using it as the standard for collection.

Do we really need all these cops?

Some in the city, like Steve Harris, the owner of the Old Port bar Rosie’s, question the necessity of having such a police presence in the first place, especially during the daytime. “If [police chief Chitwood] would transfer some of his daytime budget and move it to the nighttime,” he says, “he wouldn’t have to pay overtime.”

Harris cites the two mounted police “who give directions to tourists” as an expense that could be cut.

At the meeting on August 6, councilor Geraghty questioned the need for extra police coverage in the Old Port in the morning when she said “I don’t think we need them down there at 8 a.m. on a Sunday or a Monday or a Tuesday.”

According to deputy chief Ridge, however, cutting down foot patrols in the morning is not an option, as the police are guaranteed assignments in their contracts and the hours of the assignments cannot be manipulated.

“When I send two people to walk down there during the day,” says Ridge, “they are working from 8 a.m. till 4 that’s their assignment. I can’t just arbitrarily tell them to work different hours.”

In addition, says Ridge, it was the retail and bar owners who requested all the Old Port coverage in the first place.

“You go back seven years ago, there was no additional police support in the Old Port,” he says. “We started adding from 10 p.m. till 2, and every year since then the Old Port comes back and says ‘We need more.’ We added evening coverage. Then the retailers started complaining about groups of people harassing customers, and they wanted more coverage during the day. Every year in the fall there would be a meeting with councilors, and police, and business owners discussing more coverage. It has gotten to the point where the council says ‘enough is enough.’”

While extra police is one way to deal with problems in the Old Port, there are, perhaps, other methods. The police in Burlington, Vermont, for example, have worked with city hall and bar owners to come up with innovative methods for policing Church Street, a neighborhood like the Old Port that has numerous bars in a small area.

“For the last two years,” says lieutenant Walter Decker of the Burlington PD, “we’ve launched a program where our officers work with the staff of bars, training them in alcohol rates and in dealing with problematic behaviors. Since we started the program, we’ve seen a decrease in rowdy behavior and fighting.” Decker explains that the city has also seen a decrease in problems in the area since officers began enforcing fire code occupancy rates. When there are less people in a bar, he says, staff is able to more accurately monitor alcohol consumption. While bar owners initially protested, many have since been able to decrease their cost of business insurance.

While the number of cops on Church Street does swell to five, six, or seven at closing time, Decker stresses that Burlington has contained its problems by working with the businesses not simply through “throwing cops at the problem . . . It’s much more effective to use that gun and badge on major issues like drugs then have a cop with a badge and a gun and $50,00 worth of training and equipment put a drunk college student to bed.”

Three ways to squeeze a bar

NO EQUITY 1: Fuji (left), just up the block from Gritty’s (right), wouldn’t be subject to the “bar stool tax,” though they provide similar entertainment on the weekends.

Portland City Council, however, feels pressure to solve the problem now, and innovation takes time. Right now, it’s more focused on figuring out how it wants to make the bar owners pay. The bar tax was on the August 6 agenda, but the council tabled the issue. There are currently three tax options floating around City Hall. The first, a “bar stool tax” will charge every bar with an overlay license — originally created in 1997 to limit the number of bars in the Old Port — a fee arrived at by multiplying the bar’s maximum occupancy rate by $4.25 and adding $250.

This is a problematic option as it penalizes bars simply for being large. The Old Port Tavern, which has an occupancy of 884 (including the sparsely used banquet facility), would have to pay $4,007 a year under the plan. Meanwhile, Rosie’s, which supposedly only holds 58 people, would pay $496.50. Is the Old Port Tavern really eight times more responsible for police presence in the Old Port?

The second option is a variation on this tax. According to Mayor Cheryl Leeman, the council is currently working on a compromise to the “bar stool tax” which would raise the per seat fee to $4.50 but put a ceiling of $1750 as the most any one bar could pay.

The third option — the original proposal for raising money for police overtime — is to raise the cost of the Old Port overlay license from $250 to $850. While every bar would pay the same fee under this original scheme, bar owners are not exactly singing the idea’s praises. Not only would it represent a 240 percent increase in the price of the license, but it would be the second raise in the license’s cost in two months. In July, the council raised the overlay license to $250 from just $50.

Councilor Geraghty favors raising the overlay license over the “bar stool tax” because it hits every bar equally. At the council meeting August 6, Geraghty said “I would encourage us not to go to the $4.25 tax. [Bar owners] have talked about equity. I think we should give them equity. They all get the same coverage.”

However, according to councilor Jay Hibbard, who designed the “bar stool tax,” if the council goes back to the increased overlay license fee, $850 might not be enough.

On August 6, City Council decided to spread the $45,000 around a bit by taking $15,000 from the Portland Downtown District (PDD) — a marketing group that collects funds from all the businesses in the Old Port and the Arts District.

Sounds nice, right? Now we’re down to $30,000.

Not so fast.

One problem with the PDD plan, which was also created by Hibbard, is that it supplants a previous plan, created by councilorJack Dawson, that would have exacted $25,000 from retail businesses, by taxing retailers in the overlay zone $100 and retailers in the downtown area but outside the overlay $50. So, actually, the PDD plan leaves us $10,000 short. The difference will have to be made up by the bars, and if the council decides to hike the overlay fee, Hibbard says it will have to jack the cost all the way up to $1034 per license.

The PDD plan also ends up hitting the bars twice, as they are members of the PDD and will pay once for the $15,000 PDD collection and once either for the “bar stool tax” or the overlay license hike, whereas the retail plan would have hit the bars only once.

Though no one in the arts district has yet cried foul, it seems unfair to tax retailers near the Portland Museum of Art for police overtime in the Old Port. Ted Ney, board member of the PDD, says he believes the cost of police coverage should be covered by the general fund. Since that idea received little support on the council, he “begrudgingly supported Hibbard’s plan” to take $15,000 from the PDD as Dawson’s plan would have been too difficult to enact.

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems

Many bar owners agree with Ney that the money should come from the general fund, i.e. the property tax. “Police, like the school department and road maintenance, should come out of the general fund,” says bar owner Harris.

Harris argues that all Portland citizens pay for Portland schools whether they have kids in the school or not. Similarly, he feels that all Portland citizens should pay for police in the Old Port.

Like the schools, which in theory educate good citizens who benefit the entire community, some would argue the Old Port supports the whole city. According to city tax assessor Richard Blackburn, the area generates 6.5 percent of the city’s real estate taxes, despite occupying only two percent of the land value. Further, the area is in large part responsible for Portland’s status as a tourist destination. On the other hand, according to Deputy Chief of police, Bill Ridge, the Old Port is responsible for 20 percent of the crime in the city.

Russell Riseman, owner of the Alehouse, a bar in the Old Port, agrees with Harris that police costs should come from the property tax. Riseman, however, notes that “there is very little chance” that the council will agree.

Riseman is most likely correct. According to Geraghty, the only councilor who believes the property tax should pay for the overtime is Nick Mavodones, who was out of town and unavailable for comment for this article. Every other councilor, it seems, believes that the Old Port is responsible for coughing up some of the cash to pay for the cops.

As councilor Hibbard says, “We are not going to assess this to the general fund. The rest of the city is not going to pay for this. This is related to the fact that there are 28 or 29 bars in the Old Port that require a higher proportion of services than anywhere else in the city.”

For Riseman, whose bar has not had a single police call in the last year, if the city will not take the police costs out of the general fund, the next best plan is to hit up the establishments that consistently cause trouble, instead of all the bars in the overlay zone.

Riseman has sent a plan to city council that corrects what Harris calls “the sheer arrogance of selecting one business in town — the bars — and limiting it to the Old Port.” Under Riseman’s plan, a tribunal created by the city would oversee the entertainment and liquor license renewals for all establishments in the city, not just the bars. The tribunal would review the police calls at the establishment and decide whether the calls were “benign” — not the business’s fault — or “black marks” — violations like over-serving alcohol or fights inside the establishment. Six “black marks” and the business would be forced to hire a policeman during all operating hours.

Riseman says his plan would end up sending more money to the police department than the “bar stool tax” or increased overlay license fee. One problem with the plan, however, is that even with the tribunal it may still be too difficult to determine who deserves a “black mark.” For instance, a drunk who starts a fight in one bar could have been over-served in a bar down the street.

Overlay Outrage

On top of this heap of concerns is the fact that both the “bar stool tax” and the overlay license increase are attached to the concept of the overlay zone, which appears to be drawn somewhat arbitrarily.

Stretching from Commercial Street to Middle Street (north to south) and India Street to South Street (east to west), the overlay zone excludes certain bars that lie just outside the zone. For example, most of the bars on the water side of Commercial Street, the Breakaway on India Street, and the Free Street Taverna on Free Street are excluded and therefore will not be hit by either of the taxes.

As councilor Jack Dawson says, “there are some problems with the way the overlay is working.”

Finally, there is the issue that some restaurants provide bar-like entertainment, but because they are not bars, do not have to obtain the overlay license. Fuji, for instance, serves alcohol and on weekends hosts dance parties, but because it is not a lounge it is excluded from all the proposed taxes except the PPD contribution.

It is important to note that all the tax possibilities are one-time-only hits, due to a “sunset provision” which mandates that they expire after one year. However, according to Mayor Cheryl Leeman, “they could be renewed” next year. The “sunset provision” does allow bars, as Leeman says, “the opportunity to take some responsibility for their businesses and what’s happening.” For instance, through an improved plan for self-policing, the bars could potentially reduce the need for police in the area.

At the same time, the “sunset provision” allows the city the opportunity to iron out the kinks in the overlay licensing process before collecting from the bars again next year. Some bar owners might ask: Why not fix these problems before assessing the tax this year?

According to councilor Hibbard, the sooner the tax is put in place, the sooner the city can collect when overlay licenses come due.

Hibbard, a fan apparently of efficiency over fairness, says that a “reach back plan,” where the city delays collecting until the overlay zone questions are settled and then reaches back to collect license fees that have come due in the ensuing months, would be too complicated.

Also: Why is the city refusing to pay for police protection it paid for last year? It would seemingly make more sense if the council capped the spending and refused to pay any more than it has in the past. But cutting back $45,000 from last year’s expenditure appears haphazard.

NO EQUITY 2: The Breakaway (left), across the street from the overlay zone, would not be subject to the same taxes as The Big Easy (right), its blues brother.

Hard Times

However city council decides to collect the $30,000 left over after the PDD plan, the tax will hit different bar owners differently. For Sarah Waterman, owner of Club Subterra, a new, large tax could be potentially devastating.

“Our rent is more money than I can afford to pay. I’m the one who cleans my bar at night because I can’t afford to pay people . . . I cannot afford to pay a large fee all in one chunk.”

For Harris, the tax, in whatever form it comes, “will be another license on top of a license.” Harris says that the bar owners are, at least in part, responsible for the revitalization of the Old Port and they are thanked by the city by a plethora of taxes.

Harris says the city liquor tax is higher than any other place in Maine. A class A Lounge license (required before one obtains the $2210 state license) in Portland costs $1800. In Bangor, the price is $319. In Skowhegan, it’s $25. On the other hand, Lewiston, not nearly as happening a town as Portland, charges $1500 for the license.

Harris also complains about the numerous other fees bar owners must pay including $120 yearly per video game and juke box and $75 for a sidewalk sign (see sidebar). All this amounts to a difficult atmosphere for the small business owner, says Harris. “They think we go downstairs each night and light cigars with $100 bills,” he says.

Councilor Dawson believes $30,000, spread amongst the 26 bars in the overlay zone, “would not hurt anyone too badly.” Dawson’s theory is that bar owners can just pass the fee along to their customers. “Having fun costs money. Being protected costs money,” he says.

Dawson believes a small increase in the price of beer will not put popular bars out of business. “If I like Gritty’s,” he says, “and if I have to pay an additional 18 cents for a beer, I would still go down there.”

In addition, a raise in price, says Dawson, could serve as “an indirect way to close a few of the bars down there.” This in turn, could help reduce the amount of problems in the Old Port. “Everybody says there are too many bars down there.”

You be the judge of that. If you’re an avid cop-watcher, these best of times will continue. But if you’re a bar-hopper, you may find yourself with a few less nesting places this time next year.

Noah Bruce can be reached at nbruce@phx.com