According to Dildine, a majority of city council members all but ignored Mihalchick's findings because they considered evidence against the Hard Times the administrative law judge never heard. The day before the council's final vote, during a meeting where members talked about issues that would be voted on the following day, a police department representative was asked about the number of 911 calls made concerning Hard Times. According to Dildine's filing with the court of appeals, Assistant City Attorney Tim Skarda originally planned to present Mihalchick with that information but changed his mind after the Hard Times attorney revealed his plans to point to other locations that generated more 911 calls.
Statistics from the Minneapolis Police Department show in 1999 that 911 registered 185 calls concerning the café. During that same period there were 503 calls to the intersection of First Avenue North and Fifth Street North (near many bars in the Warehouse District), and 451 calls to City Center in downtown Minneapolis.
Craig Lassig
Lawyer Larry Leventhal contemplates a café and its hard times
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Council member Paul Ostrow was among those who voted against the revocation. A lawyer by training, Ostrow says he can't say what his colleagues did or didn't consider in making up their minds, but thinks it was unwise to consider new evidence late in the game. "I do feel like we really should have limited our conversation and our discussion to what the administrative law judge found the facts to be," he says.
Ostrow also thinks the city has unwittingly set a new standard. In his view, any business that has drugs sold on its property--whether they know about it or not--should now be subject to the same harsh penalty as the Hard Times. "I just don't think shutting down a business for an entire year for failing to do all that it could have done to prevent drug use is fair or reasonable," argues Ostrow.
Skarda believes the city will prevail on the appeal, noting that the Hard Times' contention, and the administrative law judge's conclusion that employees were unaware of nearby drug deals is ridiculous. "If you make the argument that there's so much drug activity in the Cedar-Riverside area, then how can you argue that you didn't know it was going on?" he asks.
But Hard Times attorney Larry Leventhal still believes the core of the Hard Times appeal is unimpeachable: Nothing in the findings of the administrative law judge warranted the closure of the café and the city council ignored those findings. "There have been places where there have been shootings and knifings and the site of repeated drug convictions. How many places are closed down because of those things?" Leventhal concludes. "We believe that the action initially was based more on the legal lifestyle of people who frequented the café, rather than any of the announced issues associated with the café."
