The hearing to renew liquor licenses for local businesses, including the Park Sports Bar on the corner of South Park and Church Street, has been moved from tonight to June 19. The bar faces objections to license renewal by neighbors who, disturbed by excessive noise at 2 a.m., filed a complaint against the bar on May 11. In addition, 12 charges have been filed against the bar by Montclair’s municipal prosecutor, Kenneth Strait Jr, according to Ira Karasick, Township Attorney.
Siena resident Nancy LeRoy led the efforts to file a complaint against the bar, as she has made numerous attempts to report the “drunken screaming and staggering around the neighborhood,” coming from the bar since she moved in during the summer of 2010.
Prior to that, neighbors had made multiple attempts to stop the noise – calling police, speaking out at council meetings, as well as writing to and meeting with city officials. Last month, LeRoy called the State Attorney General’s office.
On May 30, Prosecutor Kenneth Strait Jr. brought up 12 charges against the bar, including buying alcohol from a prohibited source and illegal drug use on the premises. The drug use allegation, as reported by The Montclair Times, occurred in 2009 when police on an ABC (Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control) inspection found owner Jeffry Melnikoff smoking pot inside the bar.
Other charges include incidents initially reported over two years ago, including five reported bar fights, several with underage patrons. With each charge, the bar could face a 30-day liquor license suspension.
One June 19, the bar’s liquor license will be up for renewal, along with every other license in town, said Karasick. There will be a hearing at the meeting where local residents can voice their objections.
The council acts as the court, said Karasick. They can either renew the license, suspend it, or renew it with restrictions.
“We are hoping restrictions will be placed on the renewal of the liquor license,” said LeRoy.
The lame duck council’s term ends on June 30, which means the disciplinary hearing to address charges filed by state against the bar will be heard later in the summer by the new council, according to Karasick.
The date of the second hearing has not been decided yet.
Unrelated, I’m going to be moving next to the airport…can you all please stop those pesky airplanes from coming and going ?
Also the license is worth about 700K, maybe the Sienna residents should chip in and pay the bar that cost instead of trying to ruin someones business.
smoking pot in the bar should be rewarded not punished. alcohol kills, marijuana saves. if they were smoking instead of drinking, your noise problem would also be solved.
Let’s hope it gets renewed.
There are a lot worse things going on in Montclair than toking it up in a bar. Get a life, people.
Who owns the license? The Park Sports Bar or the building owner?
The real question, paine, should always be (at least in Jersey), “who is the owner of record?” (Hint: it often doesn’t match up with actual ownership/control for assorted reasons.)
Buying alcohol from unauthorized sources used to be an automatic 30 day suspension of business for the license holder. Plus a hefty fine and back liquor taxes with penalties.
The pot charge is probably a misdemeanor for the owner. Being convicted of a felony (which this doesn’t appear to be) was an automatic lifetime disqualification from holding a liquor license, or legally owning a weapon in NJ.
Many alcohol related issues are resolved administratively via substantial fines in NJ, but it will be interesting to see if the Siena folks monitor the progress of the complaints through the political/regulatory thicket in Montclair. Twelve charges at 30 days each could give the Siena about a year’s respite if each complaint was sustained.
Alternatively, the settlement could allow a significant reduction in Montclair’s indebtedness…
The blight the V Bar presents offers cockroaches, employees and ‘patrons’ with “the drip”(Coke) casually gathered for the benefit for confidential informant work/police salaries/quotas, oh and there are the prostitutes that a questionably attractive high self esteem man could not resist. This weird breeding ground also exists at the heart of a community, were safety, children, and lawfulness supposedly exists. Any tolerance for this type of establishment is like the community saying it must preserve Tupac’s way of corrupting society because he was a poor misguided minority. As if V bar couldn’t choose to be normal entity and stop projecting it’s issues, and just internalize one thing at a time and gradually mature. Instead adult brain damage and self medication is indicative of frontal lobe immaturity, and there is a chaotic I.D. driven state similar to that of a child and sexually immature. The result is a predatory state were all associative behaviors of ‘play’ groups are inherently predatory and arbitrarily trivial in collective value. Does Montclair really want to use police officers as a substitute for parenting and unqualified psychological treatment? I doubt anyone on the police force has the I.Q. required to humanely assess and tolerate the stresses of a ‘controlled experiment’ that is really being called for by people who are actually crying out for help. And there shouldn’t be a symbiosis for detectives who want to monitor and develop their ‘intelligence’ which is really stupid talk for M.O. and the sometimes unwarranted stalking of unique individuals (latent profiling). Which reminds me of some weirdo who videotapes someone with the same sexual anatomy as themselves having sex, and then publicly airs the display. Most people would prefer a traditional ‘relationship’ where they are FORMALLY allowed to participate and share in a sexual relationship with ONE other partner, the dramatic chaotic power struggles and public displays of affection are pathetic. The fact that the police again predictably allow this scene to play out repeatedly somehow declares their complicity in proliferating this type of behavior.