Most Myrtle Beach bars avoid 2 a.m. closing, for now

Myrtle Beach City Council tabled a citywide measure Tuesday on 2 a.m. closing times for bars and clubs, as some officials voiced concerns over how it could affect new and existing businesses.

Councilman Wayne Gray questioned whether it would be fair to stop a business from adjusting its closing time later, past 2 a.m., if it had not been the scene of recent crimes.

Gray said it’s “arbitrary” and unfair that many businesses would have been exempted from the new rule. City Manager John Pedersen presented council with a list of 10 locations he said could be eligible to continue staying open late because they had not seen significant crime.

“My business may evolve to where certain times in the year, I would want to stay open ’til 3 a.m.,” Gray said, “(It) gives me a whole new wrinkle to this ordinance that I’m uncomfortable with.”

The change to bar closing rules was presented to council as a way to curb late-night crime, but Gray also wondered aloud whether the restriction could scare away some nightlife entrepreneurs that could help develop older parts of the city.

Councilman Randal Wallace expressed concern over Club There, which used to open at 2 a.m. Its main clientele is visitors leaving other bars that were closing down, and it was included in the list of businesses that would have been exempt. But it’s also located in the superblock, meaning it’s closed for late-night operation since a separate emergency ordinance passed Nov. 8 to close bars in that neighborhood at 2 a.m.

“I hate to pass any serious law that basically screws one guy in the whole community. That hardly seems fair to me,” Wallace said.

The superblock ordinance, however, was approved for a second time in a 4-2 vote Tuesday afternoon, making it permanent. Emergency ordinances automatically lapse if they are not approved in a second vote, and the regulation would have phased out on Jan. 8 without Tuesday’s approval.

Councilmen Wallace and Mike Chestnut were the dissenting votes, and Mayor John Rhodes aas absent and out of town after the recent death of his father. Now, Club There has no recourse to operate late into the night. One of its owners, Denis Gilgan, told The Sun News he has had to pay rent and expenses out of his own pocket since the original 2 a.m. closing mandate.

“I thought they were gonna drop it, because I really haven’t done anything wrong,” he said.

Some council members, however, were eager to deal with public safety through the bar closing times as Myrtle Beach grapples with the aftermath of late-night crimes, many centered in the downtown area. In one case, five were injured in a Nov. 5 shooting inside Pure Ultra Club; another “murder for hire” committed outside the former Club Levelz in February 2015 recently resulted in a life sentence for 31-year-old Kevin Tyrone Bryant.

“Five people are shot in one of our bars,” Jeffcoat said. “You could almost call that an act of terrorism, and I think that the events we have suffered in the superblock have placed our residents and our first responders at risk.”

A handful of bar and club operators also came before City Council Tuesday to speak about their experiences with the city, most from locations in the superblock. Natalie Litsey, owner of Natalia's Bar & Grill, said businesses are afraid to call police when incidents happen late at night because they feel it could contribute to a case to shut them down. Litsey's business license was suspended at the end of November.

“That’s telling the business it’s not okay to speak up, and if we want the streets to be clean, then we all need to work together,” she said.

Myrtle Beach's crackdown on late-night bars and clubs was spurred by the Nov. 5 shooting, but the ramifications have spun out since last month into multiple city policies that have not just targeted the superblock, where Pure Ultra is located, but other areas. Last month, the city constructed a fence by Futrell Park in the Booker T. Washington neighborhood, a historic, majority-black area, as officials said they were trying to curb gang violence.

Chestnut, who was the only dissenting vote on the Nov. 8 measure on superblock closing times, was supportive of that fence. On Tuesday, however, he was skeptical of blanket measures for bar closures.

“I’m just trying to figure out, where do we stop?” he said. “I don’t want to see nobody get hurt, nobody get shot, but are we next going into Circle K that gets a robbery two or three times a year?”

This story was originally published December 13, 2016 at 3:56 PM with the headline "Most Myrtle Beach bars avoid 2 a.m. closing, for now."