The Champaign City Council voted unanimously last Tuesday to draft a bill allowing bars without kitchens to serve alcohol on the sidewalks in downtown Champaign.

Current regulations say that only a “sidewalk caf‚,” defined as any business with a kitchen, may operate outdoors and only off-campus. The new law would let bars and retail stores work on the sidewalk as well but would keep the campus area closed.

Several bars and businesses in Champaign have asked to operate outdoors, including The Blind Pig, Soma, Circles, Dandelion, Homeworks, and Ten Thousand Villages, said Bruce Knight, Champaign’s planning director.

Chris Knight, owner of The Blind Pig, said his bar had already applied for and received a license before they were told they could not work outside.

“We used to have tables out on the sidewalk, but the city took our license when they found out we don’t have a kitchen,” Chris Knight said. “We already paid the licensing fee, so it seems pretty arbitrary.”

Soma and The Blind Pig are the only downtown bars that do not have kitchens and would be interested in serving outside, Chris Knight said.

The change in regulations may be a precursor to allowing campus restaurants to operate as sidewalk caf‚s. The council has decided in the past that the amount of pedestrian traffic on campus made sidewalk caf‚s unusable, said Councilman Vic McIntosh, but that could change.

“We are definitely going to look into it,” McIntosh said. “If we opened it up to everyone, though, we would eliminate the walkways we’ve created. It will have to be studied on a case-by-case basis, and then how do we decide who deserves it?”

Chipotle and Noodles & Company, two new businesses coming to the corner of Sixth and Green streets in October, have both requested to operate as sidewalk caf‚s, the Champaign City Council said during their meeting last Tuesday.

Tom Weigand, the owner of the Noodles & Company franchise coming to Champaign, said student traffic and outdoor seating could coexist.

“We have restaurants in Ann Arbor, Mich., in Madison, Wis., in college towns throughout the country, and a lot of them have outdoor seating,” Weigand said. “Yes, it does impede sidewalk traffic a little bit, but as long as you follow codes for sidewalk width, it brings a lot of energy … Green (Street) may be too narrow to make it feasible, but on the Sixth Street side, there is adequate room.”

If sidewalk caf‚s are allowed on campus, McIntosh said, it would not be until at least the 2006-2007 school year, and it would not include establishments that primarily serve liquor.

McIntosh said the council hopes allowing businesses and bars onto the sidewalk would create a more festive atmosphere downtown. Naomi Rempe, manager of Ten Thousand Villages, has been one of the business owners pushing to be allowed to operate outdoors.

“My notion is just that it … makes (downtown) a more welcoming place, not that I want to do it a lot,” Rempe said.

Danelle Jameson, owner of Circles, a women’s boutique in downtown Champaign, said her business used to hold sidewalk sales regularly, not knowing it was illegal.

“Twice a year we’ve had the sidewalk sales that every major city has, and then all of a sudden, it was a controversy,” Jameson said.