If Lewiston city officials want crickets to serenade downtown’s empty streets, they should re-zone a portion of Park Street to eliminate bars and nightclubs. It’s easy, after all, to sleep peacefully in a ghost town.

Complaints about noise from patrons of Park Street nightspots have prompted city officials to consider prohibiting such establishments from the street. Two businesses – Club Adrenaline and the Blue Elephant – would then become endangered species. Similar concerns led to the closure of an Auburn nightclub, The Cellar Door, earlier this year.

Shuttering the clubs to chase away patrons goes against what needs to happen in Lewiston’s and Auburn’s downtowns. The Twin Cities need a safe and attractive social scene, not a nonexistent one. There are enough empty storefronts without pushing policies that could create more.

And it’s amazing this stringent re-zoning plan has been described by its sponsor, City Councilor Lillian O’Brien, as – incredibly – a response to happiness. She said it’s patrons “in a happy condition” leaving the nightclubs who are causing headaches for elderly residents of a nearby apartment block.

A government crackdown on happiness? We think not. O’Brien should ditch the euphemism. It doesn’t work.

Neither does her proposal, as there’s little reason to hamstring the future of Park Street based on complaints about the present. If the issue is behavior of patrons outside, that is what possible solutions should target, since noise from the bars themselves is apparently inoffensive.

We’ve offered solutions in the past. In August, we suggested Cellar Door owner Paul Morency hire off-duty police to help control his clientele. Yet when Morency offered to do it, the city of Auburn shot him down. “It is clear that staff is not trained to handle this kind of a crowd,” police said about the plan.

Instead, the Cellar Door is gone. So is Morency’s other bar, the Midnight Blues Club, which closed last month. Now Club Adrenaline and the Blue Elephant are in Lewiston’s cross hairs, and if they close as well, the downtown social scene in the Twin Cities will fade.

Downtowns in both cities are germinating, but far from flourishing. Officials need to find creative solutions to growing pains, not place harsh restrictions on business owners.

The United States Department of Justice’s office of community policing says hiring off-duty police is an often overrated method of making bars safer. Among its recommendations for bars are banning repeat offenders, using passive security methods – such as cameras – to discourage bad behavior, or changing or staggering closing times to reduce the likelihood of late-night incidents.

All are good ideas, since re-zoning Park Street to make it off-limits to bars and nightclubs isn’t one. Turning downtowns into ghost towns after dark is the last thing L/A needs, as are severe penalties for solvable problems.