[Mpls] City Hall Stomps on One Man's Dream

[Delcalzojan]

The morning Doug Growe's column detailed the plight of a man who had followed the rules, got the necessary permits for a business, rehabbed a building, and then had it all trashed by a City Council Ordinance that was effective upon passage that banned such business at the man's location.  It brought to my mind another incident.

The other night my husband and I headed over to one of my favorite Italian restaurants, Duigi's on 22nd Avenue S. and 38th Street for a nice dinner.  As we approached I saw that it was dark and worried that the street construction that had been going on for most of the summer had killed off the business.  However, there was a note on the door saying that the business had closed because the owner had relied on the word of a zoning or license inspector from the City that the place had a valid restaurant license.  The man had then purchased the business and had been operating for months.  Then another authority figure from the City came by and said the first inspector had retired and that the license would be revoked unless $100,000 of updates were done.  Needless to say, the man closed the business - is out his purchase price, his time, etc.  Somehow this doesn't seem right to me.  I admit I am going on the note tacked to the door, but if it is true, someone just got their life turned upside down by wrong information, or at least conflicting information, from City personnel.

No one is perfect and mistakes are made.  However, City personnel (and I was one for ten years) must try harder so that lives are not ruined.  In the above case, if the first City person was wrong, efforts should be made to help the person to make the repairs with loans and grants from the City over an extended period of time.  To summarily throw him out of business is indeed cruel.

Society works when you can rely on the word of others, particularly those whose job it is to know about such things as zoning, licenses, etc.  I firmly believe that everyone is responsible for their own actions.  Ergo, the person wanting to open a business should do the due diligence necessary to ensure that the business is proper and legal in the location he/she has chosen and before any hard earned money is poured into renovations.  Now what happens when the bureaucrat gives out the wrong information because he doesn't know the correct answer and makes up something or even worse, gives out the wrong information to hurt someone.  This should not fall on the shoulders of the business person who was trying to do the right thing.

Jan Del Calzo
Lynnhurst