Amazing, in a 7-1 vote, (Stehly opposed) the city council approved axe throwing at a bar. I will agree, that would be okay, but I will get to that in a moment.
The hypocrisy of this is that they denied a beer license to a mom & pop affordable movie theater because they were concerned about the safety of the minors, but apparently drinking beers and throwing axes doesn’t concern them.
Why? I will tell you why. Because ‘mom and pop’ who own West Mall 7 don’t own one of the largest home realty agencies in Sioux Falls. The owners of Escape 605 do. They have connections.
But the irony of this is you could have had your cake and ate it too. While they can’t put a condition on the license itself, they can put conditions on the safety plan. In other words the council could have deferred this and asked them to change their safety plan to ONLY allow drinking AFTER their axe throwing session was finished, than came back with a NEW license request.
UPDATE: One of the arguments from the owner of the bar to allow axe throwing around alcohol was that dart leagues use steel tip darts. I thought that was odd, so I asked some people who throw in Sioux Falls dart bar leagues. They told me they were unaware of a steel tip league in Sioux Falls since all the leagues use electronic boards who only accept plastic tip darts.
Not only was the vote tonight childish, hypocritical and wreaked of elitism, it was completely ignorant. You could have allowed them to have the axe range and alcohol, and done it safely, but instead they just ramrodded it through because there seems to be some immediate need to open an axe throwing bar in a building that has sat empty for several years.
I hear individual councilors say individual stupid things at meetings, but I have never seen a group of them act so idiotic before. WOW.