Happy hour ban on drink specials lifted in Naperville

The ban on happy hour drink specials in Naperville, in place for at least a decade, has been lifted by the Naperville City Council, allowing local restaurants and bars to offer special drink promotions.

Naperville will adopt the guidelines already in place at the state level for happy hours, but with a few caveats.

First, discounted drinks must end at 7 p.m. instead of the state’s cutoff time of 10 p.m., as recommended by the Naperville Liquor Commission.

Consistent with rules already in place in the city, local businesses also cannot reduce the price of a drink by more than 50% and are prohibited from serving more than two alcoholic beverages to a person, except in very limited circumstances.

For years, Naperville prohibited happy hours due to a number of alcohol-related incidents in the city’s downtown.

That included a drunken-driving crash in 2014 in which two young men drowned in a water-filled Naperville Park District quarry and a 2012 stabbing death of an elementary school teacher during a disturbance inside a club on Chicago Avenue.

Following those incidents and others, the city implemented a number of restrictions to help curb alcohol-related trouble, including a ban on allowing patrons to enter or re-enter a bar or restaurant or buy shots in the hour before closing.

In 2015, Illinois lifted its statewide ban on happy hours, which had been in place since 1989. Under new state guidelines, restaurants and bars could host happy hour drink specials with limitations, including a limit on promotional times to four hours per day and 15 hours per week and a ban on volume specials like two drinks for the price of one.

Although the state ban was lifted more than a decade ago, the Naperville Liquor Commission voted in 2017 to keep the city’s ban on happy hour drink specials in place.

“Obviously, those (alcohol-related incidents) have not continued. The city’s made great strides of improvement to guarantee the safety of our patrons in downtown,” Mayor Scott Wehrli said.

Now, business advocates say that allowing happy hour in the city will allow local restaurants and bars to be more competitive with neighboring suburbs and, in turn, bring in more money both for the businesses and the city.

“We frequently hear from business owners and operators that not having happy hour is detrimental to their competitiveness, detrimental to their bottom line, and has a negative impact on their employees,” Naperville Development Partnership President Monica Conners said.

Conners also added that for larger restaurant groups with multiple locations, the happy hour ban creates marketing challenges because they have to create Naperville-specific menus and modify their websites.

“Most of our major restaurant groups have expressed frustration over this because it creates both compliance issues and a potential for lost business,” Connors said.

Christina Caton Kitchel of Caton Commercial Real Estate Group emphasized to the council Tuesday that the main function of happy hour is to bring in customers during off hours.

“There’s no problem with the successful restaurants in this town filling Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Thursday nights in the summer,” she said. “What happy hour does is it helps entice and give those incentives to people on, you know, fixed incomes, people with multiple kids and younger that want to come out earlier and fill those slots.”

cstein@chicagotribune.com