Woody’s Wharf dancing battle triggers move to change city code

The Newport Beach Planning Commission on Thursday recommended that the city add a code provision that would permit council members to call for a review of lower-body decisions.

Currently, city code allows an interested party to appeal an action taken by a commission, hearing officer, zoning administrator or director by paying a filing fee and stating the facts of the case.

With the change, council members would be added to the language, allowing them to call for a review of a lower-body decision without following these requirements for an appeal.

The recommendation stems from a courtroom battle over a decision to ban dancing at Woody’s Wharf, a popular eatery on the Balboa Peninsula known for its lively bar scene.

Planning commissioners gave Woody’s the go-ahead to allow dancing in 2013, a decision that the City Council reversed after Michael Henn, then a city councilman, appealed the determination.

The owners of Woody’s sued. In January, a three-judge panel of California’s 4th District Court of Appeal reinstated the Planning Commission’s approval of dancing and extended patio hours at the harbor-front venue, the Daily Pilot has reported.

The panel determined that the City Council had violated municipal code by allowing Henn to appeal without submitting an appeal form and paying a filing fee.

“The City Council violated its own municipal code by entertaining Henn’s appeal even though he didn’t follow the procedures laid out in the code, and then retroactively tried to justify that violation by claiming the city has a custom of extending such lenity to council members,” Judge P.J. Bedsworth wrote in the decision.

The City Council could consider the code change at its meeting March 24.

—Staff writer Hannah Fry contributed to this report.