By JAMES SWIFT

Members of the Cartersville City Council voted 4-2 to approve an ordinance amendment allowing the scheduled autumn “pub crawl” events to take place Oct. 30 and Oct. 31 at a public meeting on Thursday evening. 

But as Cartersville Mayor Matt Santini noted, the issue is far from resolved.

“There was a lot of discussion about the main provision, which deals with having open containers when you walk around. After speaking with council earlier this week, the course of action I’d like to take is opposed to passing an ordinance that would put something in place in perpetuity, to pass the same ordinance that we passed in March for this specific event on Oct. 30 and Oct. 31,” he said. “As a caveat to that, it’s pretty obvious that the real issue that’s being discussed on this is entertainment zones, an entertainment district.”

He said the council has been mulling serious discussions about the proposal for the better part of two years.

He announced that the City’s elected officials will address the matter publicly at upcoming council meetings slated for Oct. 15 and Nov. 5, each scheduled for 7 p.m. at 10 North Public Square.

“That will give the public plenty of time to know what we’re doing, it’ll give council an opportunity to come up with things that you might want to have in the district if we were to choose to go forward with it,” he said. “I think a big swing like this, we’ve talked about it for two years, so we’re ready to have a conversation and see where we end up.”

Entertainment districts are fairly commonplace in surrounding communities. Santini said municipalities like Acworth, Kennesaw and Woodstock already have ordinances in place allowing individuals to carry open containers of alcohol within specified downtown boundaries.

Councilmen Cary Roth and Calvin Cooley represented the two votes in opposition to the pub crawl ordinance’s passage. 

“I’ve been getting letters and phone calls about this, and I’m guessing 99% of them have been against it,” Cooley said. 

One point of contention, he told the council, was the term “pub crawl” itself. 

Councilman Jayce Stepp, who voted in favor of the “pub crawl” ordinance, agreed.

“When you say ‘pub crawl,’ people think people over in Europe drinking too much and crawling to the next pub, and that’s not what this is,” he said. “This is a fundraiser, this is a good event … when you say it to people, it bothers them.”

Several residents, however, said they were adamantly opposed to the events. 

“It’s encouraging public drunkenness, it’s encouraging underage drinking, it’s encouraging violence,” said Brian Waters. “It cuts at the very fiber of who we are and it certainly doesn’t support the recovery efforts of this town, which I know the council and mayor are so supportive of.”

Waters also raised questions about the revenue generation potential for the events, adding that he has fears about the impacts of the ordinance on local youth. 

“Over the long haul, I can guarantee you it’s going to have a detrimental effect on our businesses, because the kind of people that Cartersville has attracted aren’t attracted to that,” he said.

One local businessman, Sam Franklin, told the council he also had some apprehensions about the ordinance.

“I think that some of the changes we look to make would just take away from what Cartersville is,” he said. “I get the opportunity a lot of times as a business owner to welcome people to Cartersville by the nature of our business … entertainment districts, just the thought of that scares me. What does an entertainment district look like?”

Alan Sanders, a member of the Cartersville Downtown Development Authority (DDA) board, said the events are not an “encouragement” of binge drinking or underage drinking.

“I don’t want anyone to think we are advocating turning this into a college frat house,” he said. “The pub crawls themselves are a way for people to get a chance to look at local businesses, maybe go to a place they’ve never been to and it’s a social event — we haven’t had any legal issues in terms of police arrests, we haven’t had problems with the pub crawl in the past.”

He noted that the City has already hosted about a dozen pub crawl events over the last six years.

“This allows the flexibility of keeping groups together, it allows the flexibility of not having to rush to go from place to place and quite honestly, most people that are a part of the crawl are doing it to support the local businesses,” he said. “They could go any night on their own and drink as much as they want, if they wanted to.”