By Michael Roberts, Westword | Regas Christou is frustrated. Christou has owned and operated more successful Denver nightclubs and entertainment spaces than anyone for the past four decades: His creations include The Church and Club Vinyl, which he recently sold, plus Bar Standard, 1134 Broadway, Milk and a yet-to-debut venture called Parea. But when the city’s Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection (formerly the Department of Excise and Licenses) decided to revise the way licenses are granted to commercial entities ranging from music venues to pool halls, no one at the agency sought his input or even gave him a heads-up. He found out about the process around the same time Westword published an overview of the draft proposal on April 17, prior to the first of two virtual listening sessions. By then, the plan, which is scheduled to go before Denver City Council in June, had been in the works for around a year.
“Nobody knew about this,” he says. “This didn’t come to my attention until my lawyer called me last week. I had to call other [business] people to tell them about it. A lot of my friends have been blindsided. Why didn’t they have a big-ass meeting and invite all the licensees?”
He adds: “One person who had heard about it said they’d told the city, ‘The person you should call is Regas,’ and they said they would. But they didn’t do it.”
While Christou lacks hard evidence that this oversight was purposeful, he has his suspicions. According to him, representatives of the Denver Police Department “tried to put me out of business for thirteen years because I was a witness to a shooting” — the March 1996 officer-involved killing of Jeff Truax outside 1082 Broadway, another of his properties — “and I told the truth instead of telling their story.” Since then, his relationship with city officialdom in general has been fraught, and the details of the initial relicensing draft have done nothing to reassure him that a better vibe is in the offing.
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Read more on this proposed licensing which could impact a lot of prospective clubs:
https://www.westword.com/music/new-denver-venue-licensing-pushback-regas-christou-40876002/
Read the first-draft release of the new licensing bill here.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.denvergov.org/files/assets/public/v/4/business-licensing/documents/entertainment-omnibus-bill-public-draft-4.7.26.pdf
