Lafayette passes Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area, allowing alcoholic beverages outdoors

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — From Thursday through Sunday, Greater Lafayette residents will be able to purchase and carry out alcoholic beverages from a section of Main Street business with the freedom to walk around in a designated, permitted area.

The Lafayette City Council passes an ordinance Monday allowing for a Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area (DORA), made possible by an Indiana law passed during the 2023 legislative session permitting restaurants and businesses that sell alcohol for on-premise consumption to let anyone 21 and older to leave said licensed premises with open containers of alcoholic beverages. Those beverages would then be contained to the boundaries of the outdoor refreshment area and would not be permitted to leave the area.

Lafayette city attorney Jacque Chosnek said per the new law, a city may establish up to seven DORA's, with the ability to expand or contract the permitted area as the city sees fit.

The city's first DORA will be permitted from the intersection of Tenth and Main streets up to the intersection of 11th and Main streets, but will include the triangular portion of the Trolley Plaza. The participating establishments within that portion of Main Street will be East End Grill, Ripple and Company and The Cellar Wine Bistro.

Patrick Jarboe, vice president of TBIRD Design Services and a part owner of Ripple and Company, said he was inspired to organize Lafayette's first DORA after a family trip to Grand Haven, Michigan, a beach town along Lake Michigan, where "social districts" are operated on the weekends.

"What we realized is in lieu of a festival weekend, they have an outdoor refreshment area of sorts, which operates somewhat like a festival," Jarboe said. "It really reminds me of an evening farmer's market, the way they operated, except you've got beer and wine."

Seeing that social gathering firsthand made Jarboe see the potential in his corner of Main Street, hoping to explore further what the city of Lafayette could do.

"I think this DORA is just the next phase of our partnership with the city," Jarboe said. "DORA is really a tool to promote space for people to be — it's a destination location, it's the next step of the growth of downtown."

Jarboe explained for council members that customers interested in exiting a business with their alcoholic beverage, which is limited to two per customer, would need to have purchased the drink in a specific DORA cup. The potential with the specially marked cups, he said, would be for patrons to have the ability to walk into other participating businesses to purchase another drink, reusing the DORA cup, or to simply shop or patronize a non-restaurant business.

Chosnek said additional trash receptacles would be dispersed across the boundaries of the DORA to collect discarded cups along with ample signage warning patrons that they can not exit the boundary with a beverage.

Patrons would be limited to the sidewalks and the Trolley Plaza area, Chosnek said, but special exemptions for expanding into the street would be something the city could decided on later down the road.

David Thieme, owner of Thieme and Wagner Brewery in downtown Lafayette, said prior to Monday's city council meeting, he along with other Main Street business owners he's spoken with were confused with the area of where the ordinance would encompass, believing it would include all of Main Street businesses. Upon finding out it would only be permitted to one block, Thieme said he was concerned.

"It seems like it's going to be very divisive amongst the downtown area, and that's one thing that I've grown proud of — surviving COVID and the following years together as a downtown business, and with (Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski) giving help additionally to downtown. It was very nice to be a cohesive downtown unit," Thieme said. "As of this morning, I knew of other bar owners of multiple different bars that did not know that this wasn't going to encompass the whole Riverfront Development District."

Thieme said as a brewery, his business is able to offer carry out beverages in a similar way, a privilege for breweries, he explained, by making a local product, as opposed to a mix drink with commercial liquor.

Chosnek said while this would currently just be for a small block of Main Street, this is a test block for the program, with a larger goal of expanding the district all the way down Main Street through downtown.

While there isn't a timeline for the rest of Main Street to see the DORA expand all the way to the west end, Roswarski said if things go well for the test area, the expansion wouldn't take long.

"I think like everything else we do for downtown, to get started, I think we'll be able to see fairly quickly how well it's unfolded," Roswarski said. "And we would be happy to sit down with everybody after that to see what that natural progression is to make the goal of all of Main Street as good as we possibly can."

While the city's first DORA begins to lift off the ground, Jarboe said he's excited for what's to come, having seen the success of a district like this first-hand in other communities.

"I can't wait," Jarboe said. "We hope this is a tool to help promote that 'destination location.'"

Jillian Ellison is a reporter for the Journal & Courier. She can be reached by email at jellison@gannett.com. Follow her on X at @ellison_writes.

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Lafayette approves alcoholic beverages along portion of Main Street