by Jeremy Morrison
Changes may be on the horizon for Pensacola’s bottle clubs, Mayor Grover Robinson suggested Monday in the wake of a weekend shooting at a downtown establishment.
“This area has been a troubling area for the city,” the mayor said during his weekly press conference, relaying that he has already spoken to some members of the Pensacola City Council about possible changes for the clubs.
“Some of them are prepared to come back and say, ‘maybe we don’t need bottle clubs in the city of Pensacola,’” Robinson said. “If this is the behavior we are going to get, maybe we don’t need that here.”
Shortly after midnight on Friday, five individuals were shot at the Pelican’s Nest, located on East Intendencia Street downtown. Few details regarding the incident were available as of Monday, with the shooting investigation ongoing.
“Fortunately, no one was killed,” Mayor Robinson said. “We did have some injuries, people went to the hospital, but everyone, from what I heard over the weekend from chief, everyone certainly was released from the hospital and is making it.”
Noting that the city has addressed issues at the Pelican’s Nest prior — “we thought we had a process with the owner there where they had security to where nobody could bring weapons into the place” — Mayor Robinson laid the blame for this shooting on the establishment specifically; a bottle club differs from an establishment which serves alcohol, in that it rather holds drinks brought in by patrons.
“I think it’s clearly the way the establishment operates,” Robinson said.
Pointing to his conversations with council members, the mayor said the city has the authority to ban bottle clubs from the city.
“We could say we don’t want bottle clubs, we have that ability,” Robinson said. “The city has the ability to put it in its Land Development Code, we could just take bottle clubs right out of the Land Development Code. I mean, if we wanted to, we have the ability to do that.”
Scooting Right Along
To address improper usage of e-scooters within the city — particularly in the downtown area — the city has recently required riders to return the e-scooters to designated corrales rather than leaving them on sidewalks or other areas. Mayor Robinson said that he was encouraged after seeing the corrals in action during Gallery Night on Friday.
“I did see plenty of people using the scooters not like they were supposed to, going on the sidewalk and that was discouraging,” Robinson said. “However, what I did see is multiple people, when they got done with their scooters, bringing them to the corral area and putting them in there and taking a picture. I did witness that firsthand at multiple different locations.”
The city is currently assessing how well these new scooter corrals will work out as officials consider if contracts with two different e-scooter companies — Bird and VEO — should be re-upped following this initial year.
“We’re going to be going heavy into enforcement and that’ll be addressing people that are riding inappropriately,” Mayor Robinson said. “It is my hope that by August we see that we can make inroads in getting to what we need to do.”
Lifeguards Wanted
Apparently, some city residents have raised issue with the limited amount of member spaces available for the city’s swimming pool at Roger Scott. Mayor Robinson said that there are currently 25 spaces available, and hopefully more will become available as the city is able to hire additional lifeguards for the pool.
“Clearly over the last two years we have made a concerted effort to shrink the number of people in the pool because of during COVID,” the mayor explained. “We thought the communication was clearly provided that this year we were going to be going wide open, and I think we still all plan to do that, but there have been some limitations by lifeguards, which have shrunk the number of occupants that were allowable.”
Noting that the city has not been training lifeguards during the past couple of years of the pandemic, Robinson said that he hopes more individuals can be brought on board after this swim season.
“There’s no reason for us not to have enough open spaces,” the mayor said, suggesting parents encourage their teenagers to get trained as lifeguards. “We’d love to have a way to be able to train up some lifeguards to make sure we have enough.”