COLUMBUS, Ohio — Some nights bar customers order a pile of drinks right before the 10 p.m. pandemic cutoff on alcohol sales, nursing their beverages through the last hour of on-premise consumption. Other nights there is a dash out the door at halftime as patrons race home to the couch for the second half of football.


What You Need To Know

  • DeWine said he thought the order could be lifted, but then cases surged

  • Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said most mayors support the last call

  • The last call makes for awkward evenings at sports bars when games go later than 11

These are now familiar scenes around Ohio at what used to be late-night bars due to a controversial last-call rule that appears to be here to stay while the state experiences a surge in COVID-19 cases. Drinks cannot be served after 10 p.m. and doors are to close an hour later.

During the NBA playoffs, when the clock hit 11 there would be about 10 minutes left in the games, recalled Tom Maher, an owner of the High Beck Tavern in Columbus. It is not easy to get a crowd of basketball fans out the door when that happens, he said.

Sometimes fans are more prepared. When the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals played on a Thursday night, a whole group of customers rushed to close their tabs at once.

“We had a really nice crowd, and then at halftime everybody got up and went home. In that case, it was a planned exit. You have these Browns fans, and they don't want to miss a minute of the game,” he said. “Everybody just got up and left.”

Maher said High Beck picks up later in the night and attracts a service industry crowd after their establishments close for the night. Lately, the dive bar is getting an uptick of business around 9 p.m. By 10 p.m. the bar is usually busy.

“It always seems like you just get going and then you got to quit. You’ve always got this feeling like, ‘Wow, what if we could have had the rest of the night? We'd be back in business,’” he said.

Proponents of the early last call say bar patrons act less responsibly as the night goes on and become more likely to mingle with other parties, while its opponents view the cutoff as arbitrary and argue it is crippling beloved establishments.

Earlier this month, Gov. Mike DeWine was teasing a decision to lift the 10 p.m last call. He had said it was a complicated issue. Cincinnati’s Mayor John Cranley and the city’s Police Chief Eliot Isaac have argued the last call is contributing to violent crime in the city from house parties, while mayors including Andrew Ginther of Columbus said the 10 p.m last call is effectively slowing the spread of COVID-19.

But with COVID-19 cases at a record level in the state, DeWine said at a press conference Thursday that now is not the time to lift the restriction.

Ginther, who once played football for the Earlham College Fighting Quakers, said “you're not going to meet a bigger college football fan in America.” He hears the frustration of not being able to watch games at the bar. But these are relatively small sacrifices compared to the broader toll of the pandemic, he said.

“With well over 210,000 deaths in America and a lot of families where grandparents aren't able to see their grandkids, and the loss of loved ones, and those that are on ventilators and in ICUs, those are much more serious inconveniences,” he said. “The health of our community and our state is so much more important than football.”

Maher says he has a “couple strikes” against him in terms of COVID-19 risk factors, 35 years into his career at High Beck and with his asthma, so he understands the mayor’s view about needing to slow the spread.

“The mayor has his point. Especially in the whole big scheme of things, I would rate seeing a loved one above getting a drink past 10 o’clock at night. But on the other hand, you are touching my livelihood,” he said. “And when we ask these people to go home at 11 o'clock, they're not going home. You could make the point that they'd be a little better in the High Beck with our 14 foot ceilings and ventilation than at the house party they're going to.”

DeWine said he will roll out a plan this week to provide some financial relief for bars and restaurants now that he plans to keep the 10 p.m. last call in place while the case numbers are elevated. He will discuss the plans with the state legislature, he said.

A state senate bill supported by a majority of the legislative body would restore normal hours of operation for alcohol sales. But it will take weeks for the bill, introduced Thursday, to make its way to the governor’s desk, and if case numbers remain steady or worsen a veto could require a three-fifths majority of the Senate and the Ohio House of Representatives.

Four of the Senate’s nine Democrats joined 18 Republicans as sponsors. One of those Democrats, 23rd District State Sen. Nickie Antonio of Lakewood, said she is on board with extending last call because independent bars and restaurants in her district tell her the economic impact is severe.

She said it is making it harder for establishments to bring back employees and if it is not lifted soon some bars could permanently close. The state’s case numbers seem to be rising primarily due to gatherings at private residences, she said. In her view, the effectiveness of the last call is unproven.

“What we're talking about is a time restriction. We're not talking about a restriction on masks. We're not talking about a restriction on the numbers of people in places,” she said. “Even with this 10 o'clock restriction, the numbers are going up. So obviously, it's not stopping anything.”

Other than Cranley in Cincinnati, Ginther said there is a strong consensus among mayors the last call should stay in place. In Columbus, officials have not seen an increase in crime due to the measure, he said.

“Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx have been very clear about their concerns about the Midwest and the upper Midwest, particularly for the fall and winter. And we think the alcohol sale ban after 10 has been effective in slowing the rate of infection of the 20- to 29-year-old age group, which was one of our fastest growing groups amongst our demographic groups as far as positivity,” he said.

Jill Bacon Madden, owner of Jilly’s Music Room in downtown Akron, has kept her club closed for the duration of the pandemic, other than a brief stint trying takeout that proved unviable financially. Her club attracts an adult crowd, and she said when she polls her customers she finds they are wary of patronizing indoor entertainment spaces in an atmosphere with people they do not know. And the last thing she wants is to create an environment where someone might get sick.

“If I were the governor, on this 10 p.m. thing, I think I'd hold my guns,” she said. “Keeping it at 10 o'clock right now is going to help prevent another total shutdown.”

Bacon Madden has a list of five criteria that will need to be met before she reopens. Among them, there needs to be either a widely administered vaccine, or an affordable and available therapeutic that slashes the mortality of the virus. Also on the list is a lifting of the 10 p.m. last call, which she said was a good idea from a public health standpoint but, “cut the legs out from an already crippled industry.”

For her venue, customers really start to trickle in after dinner. The club’s live shows typically run from 8 p.m. to midnight, so having to cutoff alcohol sales at 10 p.m. would make reopening unviable from an economic standpoint, especially due to capacity restrictions, even if she felt comfortable doing it from a health standpoint.

“People get loose when they drink and the longer they're around, and the longer they're drinking, the looser they get, the more social distancing gets thrown away. People get sloppy with their masks,” she said. “We are all screwed, and we're all screwed for years to come. For those of us, and I hope I'm one of them, who survive this from a business standpoint, it's going to take years for us to get back to any sort of normalcy in our business.”