They Cant Take My Lights

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Play, download and edit the free video They Cant Take My Lights.

We have had a good time working with Fernweh Fox and Don with making some funny films about what is happening around our shop being restricted from keeping our lights. We are still working very hard to keep them but while we are waiting to see what the board does we thought it would be nice to have some fun so things don't feel so intense.

Back Story:
My name is John Sellers I am the owner of Martin’s coffee and bakery and have been in business for 3 years now.

We started this coffee shop to build A self-sustaining funding model to build library’s in Nepal. Around a year and a half ago Martin Tennessee built a library in Kathmandu Nepal where my family are missionaries by supporting this local shop!

We are working on our second project now that is much larger.

Around 2 years ago we hung up the lights we have now.
Around the same time we got a grant to pay for half of our signage. We made sure that we did not stand in the way of any grants, we obviously would not want anyone to lose a grant and we don’t want to lose that opportunity ourselves.

When we installed our lights we made sure to follow all of the rules. We installed these lights to properly light the outside of our building for safety reasons and to bring more people into our shop.

On January 22nd of this year everyone downtown was sent a letter. In this letter they specifically restricted string lights and lights that are visible to the outside. The key word is visible. The new restrictions are not listed in the official commission rulebook. The letter sent by the commission is trying to control how we light whole shop, inside and out. This gives the board control to literally turn all of our lights off, inside and outside and if we don’t follow the new unlawful rule then we have to pay a fine of $100 a day until we turn them off.

The Clever way they did this, was classifying the type of string lights we have as seasonal decoration, therefore they can only be put up at certain seasons and turned on and off when they say it’s is ok.

Why all of a sudden is our local coffee shop restricted from properly lighting the outside of our building?

Our sales drop dramatically when our lights are turned off. We are in a strange position, we can’t afford for the lights to be off and we can’t afford a $100 fine a day to keep them on.

We have tried to talk to key members of the board but they have refused to talk and Have referred us to their Attorney for questions we may have...

So we are stuck. We have tried to privately work this out. We have to keep the lights on for safety reasons and for maintaining our sales and we can’t pay the $100 fine they are forcing on our small business.

One of our customers started a petition asking people to vote for us to keep our lights on and it has now reached over 2800 signatures! It is amazing to see the support of our community. We have never felt so much love and genuine care for our local business to remain in downtown Martin.

Martin, Tennessee is a great place to be and that’s what we want our coffee shop to reflect. We chose Martin because we love it here. We love it so much that we have purchased two buildings downtown. We have started a family here over the past 6 years, my son Henry was born here. This is our community.

Thank you for your support, it is greatly appreciated! We want everything to stay positive. We believe that this is a simple communication problem that we are hopeful to resolve.

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