You raise a good point. As we're developing nightlife downtown, the city needs to step it up in terms of monitoring these kinds of things. Like you, I've lived in or visited a number of cities with thriving nightlife, and while it's not 100% perfect, it is definitely in better shape than what we're seeing today. I want us to have a vibrant night life, but also want us to have the infrastructure in place to deal with it.

This is the barfiest block downtown. Id venture to say it has something to do with the fact that the two bars here are open late and have no real age restrictions. I know some places don't serve under 25 and close before 2am. Unfortunately, this block is where most of the college kids end their night.

This an examples of a typical Sunday Morning on Fayetteville Street. I think this is both disgusting and unacceptable. If clubs are going to be allowed to use public sidewalks then they must be held responsible for seeing that the sidewalks are cleaned (and many do). There were 75-100 people out front of Coglin's last night at 11:30 drinking. Law for sidewalk use restricts the number they can serve to the number of seats in their permit, which is not obeyed. The pictures below are a result of their fun time. Empty bottles, vomit, cigarette butts and trash everywhere. The adjoining building has to have their maintenance person clean and mop the entire area in front of their building every Saturday and Sunday morning. Not the only mess on the street , but the worst.

You should see the expressions on the faces of people walking down the street from the Marriott looking for a nice place to have breakfast. Not the way visitors should see our town. Nor the way residents deserve to to be greeted on the "morning after".

Thanks for your time and hope something can be figured out.

A number of See Click Fix issues got lost in the system and are just now being recovered. Our apologies for how long it took to respond to this!

There are several programs afoot here that may have some impact. The Downtown Raleigh Alliance began an initiative to change the permitting process for outdoor amplified entertainment permits in the Glenwood South area. This was developed by a joint committee of residents, bar owners, police and other stakeholders, and was approved by the City Council for implementation as a pilot program later this summer. The intent is to have a greater interaction, particularly as regards noise, but not exclusively, between residents and business owners - where owners agree to be available to discuss issues that arise and work with residents and police directly to solve these problems. They also agree to mediation if discussion cannot resolve the problem to mutual agreement.

DRA has also sent a contingent of community members to a conference to discuss best practices in other cities who are also trying to manage "entertainment districts" so that the economic and social vibrancy can continue without a lot of the negative spinoff you have been describing. They just got back and will be meeting later this week to develop additional recommendations.

Also, the Appearance Commission and the Environmental Advisory Board are both interested in the issue of trash collection downtown. Because Raleigh was not developed with alleys in the downtown area, there is no reasonable way to collect refuse and recycling from downtown businesses except through roll-out carts. The Solid Waste Services Department already collects twice a day in the downtown area, but because of noise complaints from neighbors about early morning collection (we used to do it at 3-4 am so the carts could be empty and back off the sidewalk by morning) we had to change collections to after 7 am, which means people about on the sidewalks in the morning are often greeted by last night's refuse. The two boards are working with Solid Waste Services to try to find ways to balance these competing interests and perhaps find new technologies (we're looking at compactors located in parking decks, for example) to address this problem. It is not an easy one to solve, but people are working actively on it.

Also, our Downtown Police District is very active, particularly on weekend nights when we have extra officers patrolling downtown to try to keep a lid on the kind of behavior that often accompanies partying. They are working very hard and the City Council is considering adding a shift of officers to help cover more ground as the number of people flocking to downtown continues to grow. We are victims of our own success in many ways, but be assured that there are a lot of efforts under way to try to mitigate the negative outfall from our amazingly popular downtown area. If you'd like to get involved, please get involved with Downtown Living Advocates (http://raleighdla.com/), or contact the Downtown Raleigh Alliance (http://www.godowntownraleigh.com/).