A Recreation and Park Commission committee voted unanimously Wednesday to deny the North Beach Jazz Festival permission to sell alcohol at this year’s event in Washington Square Park.

The vote by the operations committee comes two weeks after a similar decision to disallow the sale of alcohol at the North Beach Festival, a neighborhood festival scheduled for June 18 in Washington Square Park.

After about an hour and a half of public comment from neighbors, business owners and event promoters during Wednesday’s meeting, committee Chairwoman Meagan Levitan said The City’s park code bans alcohol at Washington Square Park, but for the past 12 years the commission has made exceptions for the jazz festival.

“We cannot do selective enforcement,” Levitan said. “If anything, we need to be consistent in how we enforce this policy.”

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“This is bull----,” festival organizer Alistair Monroe said after the meeting. Monroe said if the festival could not sell alcohol, it might not be economically viable and could be canceled.

Yesterday’s decision came after lobbying by the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, a neighborhood association that also lobbied against granting an alcohol sales permit to the North Beach Festival.

Representatives with the group spoke in the meeting, saying festivals that sell alcohol inhibit park access to children and encourage public drunkenness.

Monroe described the group as “narrow-minded.”

After the meeting, Commissioner Gloria Bonilla said the commission had changed its 12-year practice of granting permission to sell alcohol in city parks because of the resistance it had heard from opposition groups. “Coming from a long history of perhaps overutilizing neighborhood parks [for festivals], perhaps people want to take neighborhood parks back,” she said.

But Lynn Jefferson, president of North Beach Neighbors, said she and her organization support the festival the way it is. She said it is a boon to local businesses and a cultural event for the neighborhood.

District representative Aaron Peskin said the issue was not alcohol in the park, but access to the park. He said if alcohol consumers were not confined to gated beer gardens, as they had been ordered to be in the North Beach Festival, public access would not be hindered. “I support it and hope you will allow it to move forward,” he said of the festival.

Robert Kowel, another festival organizer, said he and his fellow organizers would appeal the decision to the full parks commission May 30.

amartin@examiner.com