After the months of heated rhetoric and name-calling, after the issue became a flashpoint in October’s city elections, after a barrage of City Council and task-force meetings that stretched from spring to summer to fall, after a three-month evaluation period that saw downtown turn into something almost resembling a police stateafter all of that, the ending felt anticlimactic.

Last week, with only a few minutes of discussion and little acrimony, the same Council that voted to limit sidewalk drinking in August calmly walked back some of those restrictions, voting 6–2 to extend the curfew from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. on weekends and revisit outdoor occupancy limits and patio delineations in a couple of months. In conjunction with Council’s vote to only apply fees to the parking decks on Friday and Saturday nightsinstead of on all nights and weekendsdowntown patrons and businesses, especially bar and restaurants owners, took the vote as vindication of their view that these increased regulations were destroying the very things that made downtown special.

“Discouraging people from doing the things they loved downtown really discouraged them from coming to our establishments,” says Zack Medford, the co-owner of three downtown bars and an organizer of the group Keep Raleigh Vibrant. “With everything going on, it wasn’t the most inviting place.”

He and some other bar owners have reported double-digit revenue losses since Aug. 14, the day the ordinance went into effect. The losses weren’t exclusive to the bars with sidewalk patios, either. David Meeker, a co-owner of the Busy Bee Cafe, says sales there have dropped, too.

Between the parking feeswhich Meeker led the fight againstand the sidewalk crackdown, “it was terrible marketing for downtown,” he says. The result was fewer people spending less moneyor heading over to Glenwood. (Disclosure: Meeker’s uncle Richard Meeker is an INDY co-owner.)

Since these are private companies, there’s no way to independently verify these claims; however, an October report from the Downtown Raleigh Association found that year-to-date downtown sales tax collections on food and beverages were up 9 percent over 2014, so things weren’t uniformly bad.

And there’s at least some evidence the ordinance was producing the desired effect. At last week’s Council meeting, emergency management and special events manager Derrick Remer noted that downtown had seen a 32 percent year-over-year reduction in quality-of-life-related crimes since the ordinance took hold. Some of the methodology was speciousdoes a reduction of indecent exposure arrests from seven to four really tell us anything meaningful?but it’s true that the sidewalks along Fayetteville aren’t quite as mobbed as they once were, and at least some downtown residents say it’s quieter now.

All of which makes Council’s vote seem politically counterintuitive. After all, of Keep Raleigh Vibrant’s seven Council endorsements, only two wonincumbents Bonner Gaylord and Mary-Ann Baldwin, who were never in any real dangerhardly an indication of a pro-bar groundswell. The day after the Oct. 6 election, Dean Debnam, the Raleigh businessman behind the “DrunkTown” ads that defined the campaign’s closing days, declared victory: “Residents of Raleigh spoke with a clear voice on what the vision for Raleigh should beand it is not #DrunkTown,” he said in a statement to the local media. (Debnam could not be reached for comment.)

And yet even Councilor Russ Stephenson, to whom Debnam gave the maximum $5,100 this year, voted to loosen restrictions, with the caveats that the rules need more robust enforcement and the DRA needs to get more actively involved. Only Kay Crowder and the outgoing Wayne Maiorano voted no.

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So what changed? Did council membersas suggested in an editorial in The News & Observerblink the in the face of political pressure? (“Sometimes, getting down in the weeds of rules, or being bombarded with vociferous complaints by special interests, causes members to make bad decisions,” the editorial board finger-wagged. “They made one on the bar rules.”)

Or was it that, instead of bowing to special interests, Council merely acquiesced to reality?

“I think it was a case of the Council looking at all of the information and looking to come to a reasonable conclusion that was fair, while dealing with some of the negative impacts,” says Councilor Bonner Gaylord.

With patrons sitting instead of standing, the crowds were less dense and raucous, Council members say. “After talking with staff and meeting with restaurant owners, actually having people in seats outside actually solved a lot of the problem,” says Mayor Nancy McFarlane.

And with the new three-strikes policythree citations and you lose your outdoor-seating permitthe most troublesome bars are on notice, she says. Those things helped more than the curfew.

During fall events like Hopscotch and Sparkcon, adds Councilor Mary-Ann Baldwin, the primary target of the DrunkTown ads, “some councilors saw firsthand some of the heavy-handed enforcement going on.”

In addition, Baldwin points to a survey released Oct. 26 by the Raleigh Downtown Living Advocates that found that only 38 percent of those who live in the Fayetteville Street District fully supported the ordinance, and most said they hadn’t seen an appreciable decline in noise. Of course, the survey sampled fewer than 100 people, rendering it statistically questionable. Despite that, Council apparently lent it some weight.

Will Marks, a resident of the PNC building who has supported the restrictions, says he’s noticed a difference since August: He no longer has to wear earplugs to bed most weekend nights. But after last week’s vote, he’s worried about where the city is headed.

“The vote was a step backwards,” Marks told the INDY in an email. “… The vote was a failure of leadership and vision.”

The vote was by no means a total victory for bars, however: The 10 p.m. weeknight curfew remains, as does a cumbersome permitting process and, for now at least, the 15-square-foot-per-person limit on patio occupancy, an issue that will be decided by the next City Council, which may not be as friendly to nightlife.

“I guess I just didn’t walk away thinking it was as big of a win as other people think,” says Kenneth Yowell, who owns Calavera Empanadas and Tequila and Oak City Meatball Shoppe. “They’re just moving the clock from one to two. That’s kind of a no-brainer.”

McFarlane also downplays the vote’s significance. “I wouldn’t say we shifted course at all,” she says. The plan was always to make adjustments after a 90-day review. If problems return with the crowds in spring, they’ll deal with it then. “Obviously we’ll keep an eye on it,” she says.

Regardless, Medford believes this to be a step in the right directionor at least a sign that Council is listening.

“We’re getting close to a compromise that’s going to work for everybody,” he says. “Keep Raleigh Vibrant is about creating a downtown that works for everybody.”

And the movement he started isn’t going anywhere, he adds. Even if it didn’t win at the polls, it changed the conversation. “I also hope we’ve built a strong foundation for positive change, and the goal is to keep growing our coalition,” Medford says.

This battle may have endedat least for the winterbut the underlying conflict remains: What do we want downtown Raleigh to look like? And how do we balance the competing needs of stakeholders with vastly different goals?

“A city is always a work in progress,” McFarlane says. “We’re doing the best we can.”

This article appeared in print with the headline “You can fight City Hall”