When I was a kid, Paul Harvey would come on every day telling a short, general story then cut for commercial. When he came back on, he’d start with “And now for the rest of the story” and proceed to tell a more detailed story. I now have a chance to share the rest of a story that a reporter chose not to share, or their editors chose to cut.

A fight is in progress between the City of Troy, Michigan and Hooters over the family (not!) restaurant opening a second location in the city.

Hooters fight gives city 2 restaurants – AP, via Yahoo! News

“You come directly off the interstate and that’s the first thing you come to,” said Wade Fleming, a councilman who voted in June to reject the transfer of a liquor license to the new Hooters restaurant from a rundown tavern that once operated at the same location. “That starts to define Troy, I think, and that’s not how we’d like to define Troy.”

Hooters executives want just one restaurant in Troy, but the company won’t close the old one until it’s allowed to serve alcohol at the new restaurant, which opened Monday on a larger, more visible site.

Critics are concerned that the restaurants’ scantily clad servers don’t fit the image the city seeks to project in its Big Beaver commercial district. Fleming said officials are trying to make the area a “world-class corridor.”

And now for the rest of the story …

As the writer hinted to, the likely reason Hooters picked that spot is the location. More specifically, so it could be a mecca for the sophmoric. Here is a photo of the freeway exit sign where the new Hooters is located:

Yes, Hooters has picked a location that seems to have called out to them like a beacon. Hooters now has a restaurant located on the corner of Big Beaver Rd. and Rochester Rd., next to the I-75 exit (# 69) for Big Beaver Road.

It appears from the article, and from a cousin who lives in Troy, that the city machinery is efficient enough for the city council to not know of Hooters’ intended move until too late. By then, city planners had already approved of designs and significant amounts of work had been completed. It appears the city council only became involved because of the liquor license transfer application.

And now you know the rest of the story.

I personally think the city council should have let the liquor license transfer go through and just accept that the system is able to make a mistake. Laugh it off and make modifications to filtering liquor license applications to the council earlier in the planning process. Instead, they’ve fanned a huge PR wildfire into a maelstrom that has provided major advertising for Hooters. For example, local Detroit radio now has commercials starting with a declaration that “Troy now has a pair of Hooters. “