Juneteenth organizers face another potential uphill climb with the Columbus City Council this evening, this time dealing with beer consumption at Sim Scott Park.
Festival committee chair Cindy Lawrence will appear before the council during its regular meeting at 5 p.m. in the municipal complex. She will ask the council for permission for festival goers to legally consume beer on park property at the festival, set for June 19-20.
On May 19, the council, by a 5-1 vote, rejected the festival committee’s request to sell beer on the park grounds. However, the council had approved both the sale and consumption of beer at the park for Juneteenth in year’s past.
The committee has since obtained permission to sell beer on private property near the park. Mitchell Distributing supplies the beer for sale along with a donation to the festival each year, Lawrence said, and that makes up about 40 percent of the festival’s annual revenue.
Juneteenth commemorates “Emancipation Day,” an event on June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War — and in effect, slavery — had ended. This year marks the 19th Juneteenth celebration in Columbus. Lawrence said festival goers have consumed beer at the park every year.
“This is the first year we’ve had to do this,” she said. “This is the first year we’ve had any problems … Juneteenth is about freedom and unity, and here we are fighting to even have a festival. It appears it’s somebody’s agenda to kill the festival.”
Police chief: Council has to approve it
Lawrence said she met with Police Chief Tony Carleton last week to request officers to patrol the park area during the festival, which city officials said is standard procedure for large public events, especially those involving beer consumption. She said Carleton told her she first needed to get the council’s expressed permission for beer to be consumed on city property during the event.
Carleton confirmed to The Dispatch he had advised Lawrence to appear before the council today, both to verify whether beer can be consumed in the park and to request a certain number of officers to patrol the event.
“They have to approve it from my understanding,” Carleton said. “Certainly, if the council does approve it, all we’ll do is have officers assigned out there (to provide security) for the event. If they do not approve (beer consumption), then we’ll have to come up with a gameplan to enforce it. Nothing is set in stone yet.”
But Lawrence said she still does not understand why her committee’s event is subject to extra steps that she does not see other events on public property — specifically the Market Street Festival downtown and the July 4 Southside Festival at Townsend Park — where beer is sold and consumed.
“My first question is, do all these other events come to the city council to ask about selling and consuming beer on city property?” Lawrence said. “My second question is, how are we supposed to keep other people from bringing their own beer? We can tell them they’re not supposed to, but that doesn’t mean we can totally stop it.”
Park reservation in place
The Juneteenth committee has applied with the state Alcohol Beverage Control board for a permit to sell beer at the festival and it has reserved the park property for the festival through the Columbus-Lowndes Recreation Authority.
Mayor Robert Smith told The Dispatch on Monday that the committee had not requested any street closures, so therefore the city council had no authority to issue or deny any permits for having the event. In the past, he said, the council had approved the “sale and consumption” of beer at the park during Juneteenth at the committee’s request. This year, he said, since the council had denied beer sales at the park, the committee needed a separate action to get permission for consumption.
“The only reason the city is getting involved in this at all is because it involves beer,” Smith said. “If they approve it, then there’s no issue … just to clarify, I have not been involved at all with these discussions. No councilman has discussed this with me, and I’m not discussing it with the council.”
Smith said, regardless of the council’s decision, there is no city ordinance that bans people from bringing coolers into the park and police officers cannot search coolers or any other personal property without probable cause. Therefore, he said, the only way the city police could enforce a ruling that disallowed the consumption of beer was to catch people in the act.
Smith added, though the council’s ruling Tuesday would specifically deal with Juneteenth, he assumed other events, namely the upcoming Southside Festival, would need to go through the same process.
The city has identified Sim Scott Park as a “high crime” area, following shooting earlier this year that injured four people. It also identified the Townsend community and East Columbus as high crime areas, and held community meetings in each of those areas to begin an effort to reduce crime there.
Neither Smith nor any councilmen have cited that as a reason for their about-face decision two weeks ago to deny beer sales at Sim Scott, but Lawrence maintains the reasons are more “political.”
Festival founder and District 5 Lowndes County Supervisor Leroy Brooks is running for re-election against Ward 4 City Councilman Marty Turner. Plus, the city and county are at odds on how to manage certain shared projects — E911 and a newly built small arms firing range.
“The festival has nothing to do with supervisor Brooks,” Lawrence said. “This is a community event. Personally, I’m just ready to remove all the politics from the festival.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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