Sunbury Council Approved a DORA for the Square. The Beer Isn't Flowing Yet.

"We've had nobody other than proponents of this, and the people that I talked to are looking forward to this," Mayor Joe St. John told the room on August 5, right before Sunbury City Council voted unanimously to create a Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area on the downtown square. If you read that sentence and pictured yourself walking out of Firehouse Tavern with a to-go beer next weekend, slow down. The vote is real. The drink in your hand is not, at least not yet.

That gap between "council approved it" and "you can actually do it" is the part most people miss, and it's worth understanding if you plan to spend a Saturday on the square this fall.

What the Vote Actually Did

The DORA ordinance lets people 21 and older buy alcohol from a participating business and carry it around the outdoor boundary as an exception to Ohio's open-container law. Council didn't just approve the concept, it declared the ordinance an emergency measure specifically to skip the standard 30-day waiting period Ohio gives municipalities before a DORA takes effect. Council's legal advisor, David Brehm, said an interested party had pushed for the faster timeline because "summer will soon be over."

Here's what that urgency didn't solve. The Ohio Division of Liquor Control still has to approve the DORA before it's live. The city still has to install boundary signage. And every bar or restaurant inside the district still has to decide, individually, whether it wants to participate and apply for its own outdoor refreshment area designation. None of that happened on August 5. All of it happens after.

So the honest timeline right now, at the end of August, is: approved by the city, pending at the state, not yet operational on the ground.

The Four Blocks, and Who's Actually Inside Them

The boundary isn't the whole downtown, it's a specific loop. Starting at the west end of East Granville Street, it runs to South Vernon, north to East Cherry, west to South Columbus, then back down to Granville. That's the historic square itself, the sidewalks and both sides of the street, plus the public park. It does not include the inside of Town Hall, the municipal building, or three nearby parking lots.

Four named restaurants sit inside that footprint and would be eligible to apply for the designation: District 13, Firehouse Tavern, Branch Pizza, and Surve. Whether all four opt in is still an open question. Participation is voluntary, and a business has to hold the right liquor permit class to qualify in the first place.

Once it's running, the rule is simple but specific: drinks go in a marked cup, a new drink means a new cup, and you can't bring your own alcohol into the zone or carry a DORA drink out of it. Hours would run noon to 9 p.m. daily.

The Five Days a Year It Won't Apply

Here's the part that surprises people. The DORA gets suspended during Sunbury Sizzle and Sounds, the Memorial Day Market, the Independence Day celebration, the Labor Day Market, and Christmas on the Square. Those are exactly the days downtown draws its biggest crowds, and they're exactly the days the general to-go rule switches off.

That's not an oversight. Big festival days already run under their own vendor permits and crowd plans, so the city carves them out rather than layering a second alcohol framework on top. If your mental model of the DORA is "every big Sunbury event, now with drinks to go," reset it. The DORA is built for an ordinary Saturday afternoon, not the square's marquee weekends.

Sunbury Big Walnut Area Chamber of Commerce President Jill Love, who pushed for the measure, framed the appeal in plain terms: it keeps people downtown longer between errands and dinner, rather than sending them home the second the last shop closes. Delaware County already has DORAs running in Delaware, Galena, Liberty Township, Orange Township, Powell, and Shawnee Hills, so Sunbury is filling in a gap rather than testing something unproven for the region.

Two Different Sunbury Drink Projects, Two Different Clocks

There's a second piece of news that's easy to confuse with the DORA because it's happening at the same time and a short walk away: Sunbury Center, a commercial development from Local Provision LLC going in at the corner of Granville Street and Sunbury Meadows Drive, about 1,000 feet from the square. It's a different project on a much slower clock.

If you've heard people talking about a new "tap room" coming to Sunbury and assumed it's tied to the square, it isn't. Sunbury Center is a ground-up build designed by Tim Lai Architect, and by the developer's own published timeline, the first building won't be finished for roughly two more years. The square's DORA could plausibly be pouring drinks before Sunbury Center pours its first foundation.

What This Actually Changes for a Normal Weekend

Assume for a second that Liquor Control clears the paperwork sometime this fall, which local officials have suggested could take as little as two weeks once submitted. Here's the practical version of what changes for someone who already lives here.

You'd be able to grab a drink from a participating spot like Firehouse Tavern or Branch Pizza, get it in the marked cup, and walk it across the square while you window shop or wait for a table somewhere else. You couldn't bring a six-pack from home and drink it on a park bench. You couldn't carry that cup to your car. And on the five suspended dates each year, the whole thing pauses so festival organizers can run their own alcohol setup without the two systems colliding.

City staff, meaning the city manager and police chief, are also required to monitor the DORA for its first six months and report back to council with recommendations. So this isn't a permanent, unreviewed rule from day one. It's a trial with a built-in check-in.

The Sidewalk That's Quietly Changing How You Get There

One more piece worth knowing if you walk or bike downtown. The city is using an Ohio Department of Natural Resources grant, now totaling $852,822 after a recent addition, to build new sidewalks along East Cherry and South Morning streets, connecting to Otis Street and extending the trail link to the Ohio to Erie Trail. That's not related to the DORA directly, but it matters for the same reason the DORA does: it's making the square easier to reach on foot from more of the surrounding neighborhood, right as the square itself becomes a place with more reasons to linger.

Put those two projects together and the square isn't just getting a new drinking rule. It's getting better sidewalks feeding into it at roughly the same time. That's the kind of overlap that doesn't show up in a single headline but changes how a Saturday afternoon downtown actually feels.

The Bottom Line for Right Now

If you're planning a fall weekend around the idea of a to-go drink on Sunbury's square, build in a buffer. The vote happened. The state approval, the signage, and each restaurant's individual opt-in haven't. Watch for signage going up around the four boundary streets and participation notices posted in the windows of District 13, Firehouse Tavern, Branch Pizza, and Surve. That's your real signal, not the council vote itself.

Sunbury keeps adding these small, specific layers to downtown life, a sidewalk grant here, a liquor designation there, a separate commercial build a few blocks over. None of them are dramatic on their own. Together, they're the reason the square in 2027 will feel different from the square in 2024, even though the buildings themselves haven't moved.

If you're watching how a town like Sunbury keeps evolving and want a local perspective on what these kinds of changes mean for the neighborhoods around it, David E Straight tracks this market closely and is always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground here. Get Your Instant Home Valuation if you're curious what any of this local momentum has done to your own property's standing in the market.