Attorney: DeKalb last-call ordinance a ’shock’
September 24, 2007 at 5:43 pm by Mara Shalhoup in News, Scene & HerdProminent Atlanta attorney Alan Begner, who represents four of DeKalb County’s eight strip clubs, as well as an under-renovation bar and restaurant in the county, says Commissioner Jeff Rader’s proposal to roll back last call came as an unwelcome surprise.
Begner says the restaurant and bar, which used to be called Nile International and is set to reopen as Pure, is the impetus for the proposed ordinance. That’s because the county fears Pure will be a hip-hop club akin to the notoriously rowdy Club 112. Club 112 and Pure will share a general manager.
“One establishment is generating a stampede to radically change DeKalb County’s affairs,” Begner says. “It’s Kafkaesque in the extreme. It’s a shock.”
If the ordinance is passed, he says, it will have “a huge detrimental effect on DeKalb County’s tax base,” driving out a late-night clientele that began frequenting DeKalb after the city of Atlanta slashed its bar hours in 2004.
“It’s as if DeKalb County imagines a disaster exists,” Begner says, “the disaster being lots of people they don’t want in DeKalb County visiting DeKalb County.”
The proposal is on the agenda at tomorrow’s DeKalb County Commission meeting, though a vote is not expected.
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