State Roundup

East Lansing
Ordinance limiting alcohol sales gets another look
EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — An ordinance aimed at curbing excessive drinking at bars and restaurants in East Lansing — home to Michigan State University — is too time-consuming to enforce and must be updated, the mayor pro tem said.
The regulation, known as the 50/50 ordinance, requires bars or restaurants selling alcohol to earn at least 50 percent of revenue from food sales. Some of the city’s older bars and restaurants were grandfathered into the ordinance and aren’t restricted by the regulation.
The ordinance was implemented in the 1980s and also requires businesses to file quarterly reports with the city, but questions have been raised about its effectiveness. A report from East Lansing’s Downtown Development Authority found that the ordinance is seen as a hassle for most of those involved.
Requiring each business to file a quarterly report results is a lot of extra paperwork for city staff to process, said Bill Mansfield, who heads the Downtown Development Authority. Even though the city can enforce the ordinance and check on businesses, this doesn’t often happen, he said.
“Maybe this is a rule that was in place for a time when the city and the state liquor control didn’t have as much control as they wanted to,” Mansfield said.
East Lansing City Council is expected to further discuss and potentially vote on whether to suspend the rule until the end of 2013 at next Tuesday’s city council meeting, WILX-TV reported. Mayor Pro Tem Nathan Triplett said city staff members spend too much time enforcing a rule he thinks is outdated.
“Is this rule effective and what the DDA has suggested and what I believe is that it’s not effective in dealing with this issue of problem consumption,” Triplett said.
Others say, however, that the regulation has worked in setting standards and worry there are no suitable replacements.
“50/50 came in back in the 80s to try to get a handle on what was a pretty wild bar scene downtown. My fear is that we would regress, we would backslide back to that,” said East Lansing Councilman Kevin Beard.

Detroit
State GOP pulls ad bashing Detroit
DETROIT (AP) — The Michigan Republican Party has pulled a cable TV ad bashing heavily Democratic Detroit that also noted accomplishments of Republicans that run neighboring Oakland County.
Republican Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson saw the ad and asked state GOP Chairman Bobby Schostak on Tuesday to pull it, saying it was unnecessarily negative, The Detroit News reported. Before the state GOP pulled the ad, Patterson released a statement saying his request had been denied and that the ad would continue to run.
“I’ve always run political campaigns built on positive messages. My campaign has asked the independent entity that produced this ad to take it down, but they’ve refused,” Patterson said. “Detroit has its challenges. But my administration has always tried to be part of the solution.”
State GOP spokesman Matt Frendewey initially said that the party might run the ad showing decrepit buildings and the city’s ex-mayor until the Nov. 6 election. But he later said that Schostak “decided it was best to pull the ad” after talks with leaders in Oakland County and elsewhere.
The ad aired Monday and Tuesday in Oakland County, the state’s most prosperous county. The ad said Detroit, which long has struggled with high poverty, is “a place known for outrageous spending and crushing debt, for blight and decay, corruption and incompetence. That’s hard on business and terrible for jobs.”
The ad showed former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who currently is on trial in federal court in a corruption case, being escorted by officers in a courtroom during one of his criminal proceedings. It then shifted to show the merits of Oakland County, highlighting its AAA bond rating.
“We do things differently. ... We are open for business and always creating jobs,” the ad states.
The Rev. Horace Sheffield III, a political activist and pastor of the New Galilee Missionary Baptist Church in Detroit, welcomed the decision to remove the ad,
“Even to run it at all ... is absolutely distasteful,” he said. “This further exacerbates an already negative issue and a division.”