Newcastle councillors highlighted a Hotel Delany Facebook post telling uni students it was "time to get smashed" before deferring a decision on whether to allow the pub to stay open to 2am.
The popular Darby Street hotel applied last year to change its closing time from midnight to 2am Monday to Saturday and from 10pm to midnight on Sundays in a 12-month trial to allow the council and other authorities to gauge the impact on "adjoining" properties.
The proposal drew 24 submissions raising concerns about increased noise, anti-social behaviour, traffic and impact on the surrounding residential area.
Council staff recommended approving the trial, but councillors voted on Tuesday night to defer the matter to further discuss whether some of the concerns could be addressed in additional conditions of consent.
Labor councillor Carol Duncan said she was "ill at ease" with the pub's application and its attitude to neighbours after reading some of its social media posts.
"One Facebook post that said, 'Come and get smashed'. Now I just think that that must make the residents feel like they don't matter," she told the meeting.
"And I think it also flies in the face of what we, this organisation, is trying to do for this city in promoting a healthy, safe after-dark economy."
The hotel published a Facebook post on July 13 which said: "Uni's back, TIME TO GET SMASHED."
"If I was a neighbour reviewing their Facebook posts, I would be feeling like that was just a smack in my face," Cr Duncan said.
She said her concerns about the application were "not insurmountable" but "too often the onus is put on a resident to complain".
The Delany is proposing a staged closing, shutting its corner public bar at 1am and its "lounge bar" and gambling room at 2am.
Lord mayor Nuatali Nelmes said she was not against late-night trading but the city needed to discuss a strategy to identify entertainment precincts with designated hours of operation.
"This is, in the space of 12 months, the second development application we've looked at that essentially is ... focused on trading after midnight for the purposes of gaming in suburbs in Newcastle," she said.
"I'd be quite concerned if the Land and Environment Court ruling [in February] peculiar to the Beach Hotel, which overturned a decision of council, will filter through the industry as a mechanism to then have a piecemeal approach suburb by suburb to change the post-midnight trading hours."
The Newcastle Herald reported on Monday that the General Roberts Hotel at New Lambton had also applied to extend its trading hours from midnight to 2am.
The council officers' report on the Delany application suggested the applicant should engage an acoustic consultant to monitor and report to the council noise emissions after midnight every three months during the trial.
Liberal councillor Katrina Wark said she was concerned about potential increases in crime associated with later trading.
Greens councillor Charlotte McCabe said she opposed the application, arguing it was not in line with the council's After Dark Strategy and its aim of late-night activity in low-impact venues in Darby Street.
"The Delany Hotel is actually the most high-impact venue that I can think of on Darby Street apart from perhaps Finnegan's right down on the CBD end," she said.
The Newcastle Herald contacted the hotel for comment.
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