Sometimes, it stuns even someone as cynical as I am how befuddled large corporations can be. Case in point: Chili’s decision to close its Greenville Ave restaurant, the first of what are today 1,300 locations around the world and the flagship of the 1,800-restaurant Brinker chain.

Here’s an opportunity for Chili’s to get some good press, to celebrate the company’s success, to get nostalgic and generally look like good guys. It sure needs the boost — its profit has decreased by three-quarters in the past two years, while its stock price is near its 52-week low. So what does Chili’s do? It announces on Monday that it’s closing the store "based on a number of evaluative criteria" and says everything will be gone by noon today. So much for sentimentality. There isn’t even a press release on the company’s web site.

Because closing this location is a big deal, a real part of Dallas and neighborhood history. Anyone who was here when it opened in 1975 will tell you that the lines went around the building. It was a hip and trendy to eat at Chili’s, and founder Larry Lavine had devised a restaurant concept that had not really existed before.

You might remember the big battle with P.T.’s Gentlemen’s Club in 2003, when a group of neighbors banded together to force the club from its then-home on Northwest Highway near the DART stop and over to Miller and Plano. Community involvement not only caused the strip club to move; legal efforts led by then-State Rep. Bill Keffer and State Senator John Carona resulted in passage of a state law prohibiting sexually oriented businesses (SOBs) from serving alcohol in a dry area, having the effect of preventing P.T.’s from serving alcohol at the new location.

Naturally, P.T.’s wasn’t excited about the BYOB concept (designed to cut into its profits and possibly make it unprofitable for the club to stay in business), so it and other SOBs filed suit, claiming the law violated their constitutional rights. The neighborhood raised the money to hire Scott Bergthold, a nationally recognized lawyer familiar with this issue, to file a "friend-of-the-court" brief. A federal district court upheld the law, but in March, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the case back to district court for further review. The case is set for trial Dec. 10, and neighborhood resident Ray Hill is leading the charge to bring Bergthold back to help. About $8,000 is needed to fund his efforts.

Hill says an anonymous neighborhood business has volunteered to match donations dollar for dollar, and so far he has raised about $4,000 (including the matching funds) but he needs $4,000 more. If you’re willing to help, send Ray an email. Ray says the donation will be tax deductible, too. And stay tuned for updates on the issue.

Here’s an interesting neighborhood conundrum: Jerry Allen essentially controls all zoning decisions in the Lake Highlands district he represents not because of any legal mandate but because of a gentlemen’s agreement that has been in place for years downtown. That’s the point Laura Miller was griping about yesterday in response to the indictments related to the low-income housing scandal in the southern sector. Miller’s solution: have the council adopt a requirement that multiple councilmen be responsible for zoning requests in multiple areas of the city, rather than just having one councilman in the affected district as the point man. That all sounds great until you consider one thing: There’s no law right now that prevents that from happening, just as there is no law making Jerry the final word on neighborhood zoning. That’s just the way it has been done for quite awhile.

Jerry has relatively absolutely authority over zoning issues here because that allows Sheffie Kadane to have absolute authority over Lakewood/East Dallas zoning issues, and so on in every council district. And it makes sense on one level — ultimately, we elect these guys to keep an eye on their districts for us, so they should be the experts. But because of the gentlemen’s agreement downtown, if Jerry says a zoning request should be spiked, everyone else will fall in line without must questioning.

If that’s the real culprit here, as Miller suggests, there’s a simple, non-legislative solution: Just Say No! Other councilmen aren’t legally obligated to follow Jerry’s lead, so why can’t they just tell him to stuff it if they want to? It doesn’t seem that difficult, and there’s clearly a precedent: No one downtown seems to have had a problem telling Angela Hunt to stuff it. They’ve taken the first step; the next one should be easy.