Airport Road Rules A Good Idea

The City Council is scheduled to consider tonight whether to impose tougher zoning and other restrictions on the city’s sprawling south side around Airport Road. The proposed new rules have been through extensive review, with the most problematic ideas put aside at least temporarily, and what’s left is an ordinance that would, first and foremost, limit the number of liquor outlets, as well as the ways in which alcohol can be advertised and sold in this fast-growing area filled with families.

Supporters of the new law say there are too many liquor stores in the area already, and that the unrestricted advertising and sales in convenience stores and the like sends the wrong message to young people. The law is less popular with the area’s many mom-and-pop businesses, which often depend on liquor sales to improve the bottom line. And it’s not clear whether the city will succeed, in the legal arena, when it comes to imposing the new restrictions that include segregating liquor sections in stores and limiting the sale of miniatures.

Still, judging by public commentary, it’s this part of the ordinance that is most popular among area residents. And in an area that includes a city intersection with the highest number of DWI accidents, it couldn’t hurt the city to experiment with new or different forms of alcohol regulation.

But the new ordinance also would impose development restrictions, many of them commonplace in other areas of the city, in an area notorious for unregulated hodgepodge. The measure’s sponsor, south side Councilor Carmichael Dominguez, intends his ordinance to promote healthy living. Thus the alcohol restrictions. But Dominguez also wants to make the area more pedestrian-friendly through, for example, zoning restrictions that would put parking and drive-up windows behind businesses so their front doors open to sidewalks, inviting walk-in traffic.

Wisely, Dominguez has agreed to back off, at least for now, on healthy-sounding but less proven zoning restrictions like banning fast-food restaurants or food carts, or incentivizing the sale of fresh food at all businesses. (Oddly enough, though, this latter idea has just been independently adopted farther uptown, where one long-established plumbing business in an already pedestrian friendly older neighborhood has added a sideline in local takeout and staple groceries. Who knows? It may prove to be zoning’s cutting edge.)

Humor aside, the City Council would do well to approve Dominguez’s proposal. South side residents deserve some of the same quality-of-life considerations that are the rule in other parts of the city.