Chattanooga Pulse

Here is one of the more interesting agenda items set to be discussed at the June 16 meeting of the Chattanooga City Council.

5.    Ordinances – Final Reading:

a)    An ordinance to amend Chattanooga City Code, Part II, Chapter 38, Zoning Ordinance, Sections 38-2, 38-185, and 38-527, relative to the regulation of nightclubs.

Here we go again.  As of press time, the newly rewritten and hopefully much more acceptable nightclub-regulation ordinance will be coming before the council for a final reading vote.

Then again, as has been our luck over the past several months, every single time we’ve written about this particular ordinance in this column, it has been tabled or postponed for one reason or another.

The last big tabling was to send it back to the Legal & Legislative committee to review the entire ordinance from the ground up, looking especially at the controversial 1,000-foot buffer between nightclubs and residential neighborhoods as well as ways to make the ordinance less restrictive and more business friendly.

At the last meeting where the old ordiance was addressed, a number of citizens and business owners expressed their opinion that the ordinance needed a lot more work to make it a workable solution to a growing problem with seemingly uncontrollable nightclubs.

The main problem that citizens seem to have with the ordinance overall is that they feel it is the right idea but addresses the wrong problem—they want the council to do something about the problem nightclubs that exist now in the Brainerd area.  It will be interesting to see if and when the council will address that specific issue and how it will be approached.

The Chattanooga City Council meets each Tuesday at 6 p.m. in the City Council Building at 1000 Lindsay St. For more information on the agendas, visit www.Chattanooga.gov/City_Council/110_Agenda.asp