URBANA – University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman is calling on the cities to put an end to the annual drinking "holiday" known as Unofficial St. Patrick's Day.

In remarks to the University of Illinois faculty-student senate Monday, Herman said he will attend tonight's Champaign City Council meeting to urge members to take a stronger stance on behalf of student safety.

"Many of us are working hard to make Champaign-Urbana a destination for people to come to," Herman said. But Unofficial St. Patrick's Day, a promotion founded by bar owner Scott Cochrane, is giving Champaign a black eye, with busloads of students from other colleges expected to hit campus this Friday and Saturday to drink.

"We are allowing Mr. Cochrane to define who we are," Herman said, noting that he was speaking as a chancellor, private citizen, parent and grandparent.

"For this to go on without the city taking anything but a strong stance is unacceptable," he said. "I think we have to find a way to get the cities to act."

Students, not bar owners, are the ones penalized, by paying $300 fines for illegal drinking or having their cars towed, he said.

"Bar owners are not being assessed anything," Herman said.

Herman said he had no specific proposals but noted the city has the authority to enforce bar rules.

"We have to find some way to convince the Champaign City Council and the liquor commissioner – the mayor – to act in the broader best interests of the community," he said.

Champaign Mayor Jerry Schweighart said he thinks he would be opening the city up to a lawsuit if he ordered campus bars to be shut down.

"It (Unofficial) is a business promotion, and if we don't like the promotion, we can't shut them down," he said.

Schweighart said he's also concerned that if he shut down the bars, "we'd have maybe 1,000 people with no place to go and they could take to the streets."

Schweighart said the city and other police agencies will "have a very heavy police presence" and that city firefighters would be checking campus bars to make sure they comply with occupancy limits.

He also issued an order last Friday banning sales in Campustown of pitchers of beer or mixed drinks, requiring all drinks to be sold in plastic or paper cups and restricting volume sales of alcohol, including allowing parties to have just one keg total for the two-day weekend.

The city's strategy at this point is to regulate the event heavily and to "put so much heat on them to make it unacceptable." That approach worked in previous decades with Halloween and Greek week, he said.

The mayor did agree with Herman that the city council could do more to penalize bar owners, as opposed to underage youths, for underage drinking in bars. Schweighart said a proposal to penalize bars where underage students are caught drinking alcohol was defeated by the city council in October 2005.

A more recent round of proposals to reduce binge drinking, suggested by the city's liquor commission, also was largely defeated last year.

As for the UI, Herman said shutting down the campus wouldn't do anything except give students a day off to drink.

"We're running an educational institution here," he said.