Is Downtown’s fast-expanding restaurant population moving too swiftly, sparking an unhealthy glut.
The question about the two dozen survivors arises because two restaurants are going dark. Two or three more reportedly are mulling closing.
One just-barely-opened eatery, Chop Daddy, a barbeque store, recently closed. Bottle Rock sent out an email announcing that it is shutting its doors in three days.
What is going on? Steve Rose, president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, was asked.
“Listening to the discussion about Parcel B at Monday night’s City Council meeting,” he said, “the amount of parking on Parcel B has been tripled since I was on the Council.
“They put in a second access to the project that I assume is going to take 80 to 90 percent of the traffic off Washington/Ince. Ad they have increased the amount of Town Plaza space” adjacent to The Culver Hotel.
“After all of that,” Mr. Rose said, “you still have a City Council member (Meghan Sahli-Wells) whom I question if she is a member.
“She only votes for the benefit of the Downtown neighborhood. Monday night, and the previous week on the Culver Studios (to add office space, build a new scene dock, and to make a 1400-car parking structure by tearing down a 300-car parking structure) her vote was the only no on both of them ‘because it is my neighborhood.’
“I assume it is her neighborhood because she feels she is having a fiscal impact on it. Her statement was, ‘I am voting no because of my neighborhood.’”
Mr. Rose said Ms Sahli-Wells’s reasoning is unfairly parochial.
“We elected a City Councilperson who has to vote for the entire city, not just one person’s residential area,” he said.
