If the city had the right to determine its own public policies on strictly local issues — as it should — the City Council could decide from scratch whether or not to permit sales of alcohol at events held in the city’s Memorial Auditorium and Tivoli Theatre. In an instant, council members could decide whether to allow alcohol to be sold for specific types of events to see if that would boost programming and ticket sales, and help reduce the city’s increasingly expensive maintenance costs for these civic stalwarts.
Alas, that’s not the case. Given the state’s often anachronistic constitution, city leaders still have to ask the county’s legislative delegation to push legislation — in reality, a private act affecting Tennessee cities just the size of Chattanooga — that would let city officials make such a decision.
Given the quirks of our state lawmakers, that makes it hard enough to obtain local authority over sales of alcohol in the city’s public facilities. It gets even more tenuous when the mayor attempts to thwart the unanimous request of the nine-member City Council for that authority, as Mayor Ron Littlefield apparently and inexplicably decided to do in recent days.
Thus it became needlessly uncertain Tuesday whether Hamilton County’s legislative delegation would decide to push the legislation requested by the City Council to gain authority over alcohol sales at these civic centers. Delegation members had to convene a meeting to decide what to do, and whether to ignore the mayor’s opposition.
That was a question because the usual procedure is that any private act must be endorsed by all involved local officials before the delegation will consider it. In the end, the delegation decided to support the Council’s request, mainly because it is “permissive.” It is not a mandate: it simply gives the city the authority to make that decision and to dictate the circumstances for such sales.