Myrtle Beach passes final reading on Superblock moratorium with provision to allow bar owners to sell

A moratorium on new bars and clubs in the Superblock area moved ahead with a few tweaks Tuesday but bar owners still say a greater plan may be afoot to push them out.

The city enacted a moratorium on the 6-acre block in October, freezing licenses to any new bars or clubs that primarily sell alcohol until Jan. 1, 2017. The window was set to give the planning commission time to come up with new zoning rules for the block that could impact current businesses.

The move hurled club owners into limbo as they waited for the city’s next decision, knowing with the new license ban they couldn’t sell their businesses if they wanted to.

Myrtle Beach City Council tweaked the moratorium Tuesday to allow bar owners to sell or transfer their bars during the rest of the 14-month moratorium.

“Who are we going to sell to?” asked Natalie Litsey, owner of the new Natalia’s Bar and Grill in the Superblock after learning of the change Tuesday afternoon.

City council passed the final reading of the amended moratorium in a 6-1 vote. Councilwoman Susan Grissom Means cast the sole vote against the ordinance.

James Patrick Brody, an agent of JB & HM Enterprises, Inc., which owns the building where the Pure Ultra Club operates at 803 Main St., told council its decision to stop issuing licenses hurt his tenants’ business.

Hector Melendez told The Sun News he spent 14 months and thousands of dollars cleaning and renovating the former C&C Furniture store that had been taken over by squatters before he moved in. He opened Pure Ultra Club in August 2014.

Melendez had plans to renovate the upstairs, but he put those on hold after learning of the moratorium and other city actions he said are aimed at driving down property values. Bar owners and employees in the Superblock said they are being pushed out for new development.

“I don’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish. I’m trying to figure out who is behind all this and what they are trying to do with the property values here,” Melendez said last month.

Brody told council the Superblock had a petition with more than a thousand signatures from downtown businesses against the city’s moratorium and a study revealing more crimes at Broadway at the Beach than downtown. He handed the city a stack of papers.

“I think the way that a lot of the owners look at their buildings down there is the same as if you had a restaurant down there and the city came in and said, ‘Wow, because there was a bad thing around the corner and because you’ve got all these people sick, we’re going to have no more restaurants,’” Brody said. “God forbid you passed away and that was left to your wife or your grandchildren or your heirs and they wanted to try to go get a new business license or a liquor license. Guess what? Your building is valued at zero now. What is your wife going to do?”

He asked the city to revisit its determination of crime in the area “and say no to who is behind the continued catalyst trying to destroy small business.”

City Manager John Pedersen said the city continues to see crime in the area.

Over the weekend “we had three employees of one of the bars who were arrested on their way into work. All three of them had drugs … two of them had weapons. One of them had two weapons,” Pedersen said before the council discussed the final ordinance reading at its morning workshop. “Then later that evening there were keep checks initiated there. Most of the establishments checked out. We did find two establishments that had violations of the state alcohol laws. So to me it really underscores the necessity of cleaning this area up.”

Melendez’s attorney, William Paul Young, told the council he thought it was a “bad policy” to try to handle police issues through spot zoning.

“It makes sense to me that if you have a high crime area that you go after the nuisance violations, that makes sense,” he said. “To do it with a zoning ordinance such as this really doesn’t seem to make sense. … It seems to me you’re going to discourage businessmen from investing in downtown, which is exactly what you’re trying not to do.”

The complaints led the council to consider an option in the ordinance that would not prevent a current business from selling to another.

City Attorney Tom Ellenburg said the new ordinance grandfathers in the rights of current businesses in the block.

This story was originally published December 8, 2015 at 7:15 PM with the headline "Myrtle Beach passes final reading on Superblock moratorium with provision to allow bar owners to sell."