Huetter bar fights county for survival

The battle between a hip-hop club and Huetter took a twist Monday when the bar’s owner claimed the business has been targeted for shutdown in part because of its racially diverse clientele.

Lang Sumner, owner of The Grail, said he thought he was doing the right thing by calling the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department whenever a fight seemed to be brewing or when his computer scanners picked out a fake ID.

But Sumner said the security measures have only been used against his business, located in the small city between Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls. One sheriff’s detective also accused Sumner of attracting “undesirable elements” to the county, Sumner said in sworn testimony Monday. “We were told that we cater to nonwhites,” he said.

County officials are seeking to revoke The Grail’s liquor license because they say the bar has become a hotbed of fights and underage drinking. Located in an increasingly affluent neighborhood just north of the Spokane River, The Grail is also frequented by gang members, said Deputy Kootenai County Attorney Pat Braden.

“All the evidence shows they are a public nuisance,” Braden said in closing arguments at the end of Monday’s four-hour hearing.

Susan Weeks, the attorney representing The Grail, said the bar was being held to a standard that few others could match. “It’s a witch hunt,” Weeks said.

County commissioners will consider the testimony and issue a decision by the end of May. The case rests heavily on two recent incidents connected with The Grail. Last April, an undercover detective purchased two bottles of beer at the bar while accompanying an underage female. One of the bar’s clients was also involved in a head-on collision an hour after leaving the bar.

“Just one of those (incidents) is sufficient to revoke” the liquor license, Braden said.

But neither incident resulted in a citation for The Grail, Weeks said. Eighty percent of people arrested for drunken driving obtained their alcohol in a bar; using the county’s logic, all these bars should also have their liquor licenses yanked, she said.

Weeks said the Sheriff’s Department submitted hundreds of police reports purportedly linking problems to The Grail, but her own investigation shows that many had nothing to do with the establishment, including the report of a dead, skinned bear being found near its property. One report of public urination submitted to commissioners as evidence took place closer to The Shanty, which is the only other bar in the town.

“How do we know which bar?” Weeks asked sheriff’s Capt. Ben Wolfinger, who compiled the department’s case against The Grail.

“We don’t know that,” Wolfinger replied.

He said the volume of calls has made the bar “a drain on law enforcement resources. … It causes a great deal of impact to the Sheriff’s Department, the taxpayers.”

The Grail is far and away the biggest source of disturbances in the county, Wolfinger said. The bar has prompted 2 1/2 times the number of complaints as the next most troublesome establishment.

Residents have long complained about noise from the bar and of clients taking their good times out of the watering hole into neighboring yards, said Dan Martinsen, mayor of Huetter. Once, Martinsen said he spotted two young women and a man having sex in a car parked in front of his house. “That was supremely irritating,” he testified.

On weekends, the bar attracts upward of 500 people, with only 12 to 16 employees to enforce the rules, according to information presented Monday.

About 35 percent of patrons were under 21, said Sumner, the bar’s owner. They were allowed into the establishment only after paying a cover charge as much as $10.

County officials say the high cover charge was chalked up as food sales and used as a ruse to make the bar appear on paper as a restaurant, which meant it could continue to cater to a younger crowd.

To prevent underage drinking and protect his family’s business, Sumner said he instituted strict controls, including two dozen night-vision cameras in the parking lot and inside the bar, pat-down searches at the door by bouncers with military police training and the scanning of all IDs with an elaborate fake-ID detection system.

Braden, the deputy county attorney, then asked, “Why would you need all that if you didn’t have a clientele that needed that?”

Sumner replied, “Thoroughness … . To go above and beyond.”

Sumner said his business has been unfairly targeted as being a hangout for gangsters. During Sumner’s sworn testimony, he said a county sheriff’s detective once told him, “Anybody darker than the cheeks of (the detective’s) bottom he considered a gang member.”

About 20 people sat in the audience during the hearing, most of whom were current and former employees of The Grail. During a brief intermission, many of them stood outside the county administration building smoking cigarettes and offering their own theories why the bar has raised so much ire.

“We’re the only place that caters to the young hip-hop crowd,” said Jared Erny, The Grail’s former security manager. “Apparently it’s a bad thing we’re trying to bring Idaho out of the stone age.”