Trash fight

<p>Revitalizing downtown with a wider variety of nightlife is practically a mantra at Santa Rosa City Hall.</p><p>Yet the city keeps finding new and creative ways to drive away businesses that would attract some of that nightlife.</p><p>The most recent example is Rendezvous Bistro, which would fill two vacant, ground-floor spaces at Old Courthouse Square.</p><p>Nino Rabbaa and his partners already have spent a half-million dollars on planning for their Mediterranean-style restaurant and remodeling the empty spaces it would fill.</p><p>Rabbaa, a French emigre, and Franco Fabiani, who owned the successful Ristoranti Fabiani on Montgomery Drive, planned to open their new venture last month.</p><p>But the city has denied them a permit. Why? Because they intend to dump their trash in bins at the city parking garage on Third Street. The same spot is used by several other downtown restaurants, and, according to property owners, it has been that way for 25 years. The garage also is used by businesses in another Old Courthouse Square building.</p><p>The city parking department decided it doesn't want the trash bins there anymore. But no one is being asked to stop using them. Access is being denied only to Rendezvous Bistro.</p><p>"We have concerns about doing anything that is going to expand garbage use in the garage," said Cheryl Woodward, the city's deputy director of transit and parking. The key word here is expand. The bins not only are used by existing restaurants, they were used by Wolf's Coffee and Cafe Japan, which occupied the now vacant space where Rabbaa wants to open.</p><p>City officials say they want the space for parking. They also express concerns about odor (though they want Rabbaa to keep trash and its, ahem, bouquet inside his restaurant and roll it out for pick-up).</p><p>The matter is on the City Council agenda today.</p><p>If the city wants the bins out of the garage, it should work out a solution with all the restaurants and other businesses that use them.</p><p>If the bins stay, allowing Rabbaa to use them is hardly an expansion.</p>