Several weeks ago, the Licensing Board voted to push back the hour at which bars must close from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m.

The Board of Aldermen has issued its own recommendations for how to evaluate these applications. Most notably, they proposed to allow the longer hours only for bars that do not lie within a 100-yard radius, a requirement that would eliminate nearly every bar in Somerville. Clever.

This is a very delicate moment for the city’s non-Davis Square bars and restaurants – for those establishments are not blessed with the massive government subsidy known as a T stop. Business is terrible for bars these days, and it’s only partly because the economy is weak.

Despite the scripts read by teenagers and Cambridge Health Alliance employees at the kangaroo hearings, the now sacred smoking ban, instituted by the Board of Health last year, has had a crippling effect on the city’s bars and restaurants.

That said it makes sense to push back the closing hour for bars as a consolation prize to the suffering bar-owners.

Mayor Curtatone may not have the power to re-stock the Licensing Board with members sympathetic to the needs of bars and restaurants. He may not have the power to enact the new hours of operation himself.

What Curtatone can do, however, is make a strong, consistent, and public effort to clearly state how he’d like the board to vote and to lobby for that result.

The mayor has shown that he is capable of leadership when he chooses to exercise it. He pushed through his Assembly Square agenda despite stiff opposition. He even made the courageous choice to flout state law and the will of the Governor when he declared that the city would issue marriage licenses to out-of-state same-sex couples.

When it comes to standing up for the family businesses who run the city’s restaurants and bars, the Mayor has a weaker record.

Just as he refused to take a strong stand on the smoking ban and replace the commuter. He is now sitting on his hands.

The mayor ran for office as a friend of family businesses. If he runs for reelection next year, he will find it harder to claim to be a friend with the record he is accumulating.