Carbondale Police Chief Steve Odum said he could not even begin to guess the number of complaints he has received about excessive noise.

After receiving a complaint, police go to the area and determine the cause of the noise, he said.

But if that offender is a beer garden, there is nothing they can do.

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Though city ordinance follows Illinois law in that noise emission, music or otherwise, cannot exceed the boundaries of a person’s property. But beer gardens in Carbondale are currently exempt from the law.

“We explain there is nothing we can do because it’s city ordinance,” he said. “Most people understand, but some say ‘you cite private parties, why can’t you cite them?'”

In fact, police told the city council that people no longer complain to them, said Lawrence Juhlin, chair of the Carbondale Liquor Advisory Board.

“They just sit there and are unhappy because they know the police won’t do anything,” he said.

As a result, most people take their complaints directly to the city.

Liquor Commissioners Steven Haynes and Sheila Simon said in a commission meeting, an alternate function of the city council, they had both received complaints about the noise.

“I had conversations with several constituents about it, so I brought it forward in the liquor commission meeting and to the liquor advisory board,” Haynes said. “There are times and days where we have had excessive noise from them, and it may be potentially a lack of communications or an oversight.”

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Simon said that most students mentioned Thursday nights as problematic.

“They were pretty reasonable,” she said. “They knew that they lived within earshot of a bar and that there would be loud music on Fridays and Saturdays, but not Thursdays.”

Simon said that while beer gardens add to Carbondale and can be a lot of fun, she would like to see some kind of limit on the extent of noise.

“They are definitely in need of some kind of regulation,” she said.

It seems that most students complain about the noise on weekday nights, while not so much on the weekends, Juhlin said. Other complaints have come from families with small children.

“I want to complain about it,” commissioner Corene McDaniel said. “You can hear it from where I live.”

Juhlin said the board reviewed the issue and asked city council to look at other towns, especially college towns, to see how they have solved the problem.

“We didn’t come up with a magic solution,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll learn something from some other community.”

However, Juhlin did say that there is something not right about citing individuals for noise pollution but not beer gardens.

“If an individual makes noise, its against the law; a bar makes noise and its not,” he said. “Maybe elsewhere somebody has been wiser than we are.”

Reporter Haley Murray can be reached at [email protected]