Local activist Jim Lissner’s newest initiative to regulate the operating hours of local bars has garnered enough signatures to qualify it for the upcoming November ballot.
“The council has the option of immediately enacting the law that I wrote if they think it’s really super good and all that stuff,” Lissner said. “But the chances of them doing that are probably slim to none.”
Lissner’s “Quiet Nights” initiative aims to reduce the late night operating hours of businesses in downtown Hermosa to midnight on weeknights and 1 a.m. on the weekends over a period of five years. Since beginning gathering signatures on March 14, he collected 2,154, of which 1,712 were verified. He needed 10 percent of the registered voters, or 1369 signatures.
“I knocked on doors, and I also hired a signature gathering company to gather signatures at the post office, on the street and door-to-door. We didn’t miss much of anywhere,” said Lissner, who estimates that he personally gathered around 400 signatures.
Lissner has been an active voice in Hermosa’s fight to curtail drinking, alcohol-related noise and violence. He has routinely challenged applications for liquor licenses in Hermosa, but has only been successful delaying approvals. In 2011 he qualified an initiative for the ballot that would have raised business license fees astronomically on many nightspots, before backing down and publicly opposing his own initiative, which failed to pass.
“Basically I told people that it’s to reduce the hours of businesses downtown,” he said. “Mostly it seemed like most people already knew about it. A lot of people said no, but a lot of people grabbed the clipboard out of my hands after I said about three words.”
At the next council meeting on June 25 Lissner’s qualification will be discussed. The city then has the option to come back in 30 days with an additional report but no matter the consensus, because of the amount of signatures collected, the city will be required to put the initiative on the November ballot.
“I think this is going to be a heated campaign,” said Lissner. “… I expect there will be a lot of wild claims and a lot of friction going on. I’m expecting there will be a lot of mailings that will probably claim that this will put them all out of business… They’ll probably claim anything.”
He added he knows it will be scrutinized but believes that it is a good piece of law.
“A lot of it [the next months] will be reacting,” Lissner said. “I don’t have a script at this point.” ER
