Alcohol licenses being filed, sales can’t start for 30 more days
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By Dave Taylor
As of Monday, January 6, 2020, Hancock County is a wet county. Prohibition officially ended after a landslide countywide vote November and licenses applications are already being turned in.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the county’s alcoholic beverage control administrator Rachael Emmick had seen applications filled out and returned by Bill’s IGA and Weber Store, and another business had picked one up but not completed it yet. More are expected in the coming days.
In Lewisport, its ABC administrator Kevin McManaway said no one had picked up applications yet, but he had only started in the job on Wednesday and would be contacting several businesses that had expressed interest.
“I’ve got a few calls I’ve got to make today to people that are wanting to do it,” he said. “They just haven’t officially come in and done it yet.”
Monday was a busy one for Emmick, with businesses wanting to know how to apply and wondering about the ins and outs of this new enterprise.
“They’ve had questions for me that I didn’t have answers to,” she said.
The state’s rules controlling alcohol sales and consumption are notoriously convoluted and evolving, so Emmick and McManaway will have a lot of catching up to do and will sometimes be aiming at a moving target.
“They’re kind of generic on some of them,” she said. “It’s just like I want to know something specifically but the wording is really generic.”
Selling and regulating alcohol in a previously dry county is coming with some hiccups, largely in the dearth of information available for governments to understand what steps they need to take and when.
“I’ve read tons and tons and tons of crap but there’s no real training online to tell me exactly what to do,” Emmick said. “But we are having a guy come Thursday to do some training with us and Lewisport, we’re doing it together. They’re supposed to tell us just exactly what we need to be doing.”
One of the questions businesses have revolves around the limited number of licenses available for certain kinds of stores, which are limited by population.
“There are two different quota licenses that have a quota of how many that we can have and it’s retail package and retail by the drink liquor,” she said.
Based on the population the county should have three, but others have said that cities must have more than one in order to avoid monopolies, adding more questions.
“We have not heard that,” she said. “We asked specifically and he said no, three for your county is it. To me it would seem like if Lewisport gets two there’s your monopoly. That’d be completely unfair for Lewisport to have two and then South Hancock can’t have one because we can only have three total.
“That’s definitely one of the questions that we need answered Thursday so I don’t have a clear answer on that one yet at all,” she said.
McManaway began his day Wednesday with some light training on statutes and regulations, which he said was as exciting as it sounds.
“It was a nail biter,” he joked.
His position, like Emmick’s, is part-time, so he won’t have an office but will be reachable by contacting Lewisport City Hall, where he’ll follow the same licensing processes as the county and state, which themselves are confusing.
“There’s no such thing as just a package license or just a liquor license or just a malt beverage license,” he said. “There’s a bunch of different licensures. And an establishment might have upwards of two to three to four licenses. It depends on what they’re doing.”
Any business wanting to get a license to sell alcohol has to fill out the application, post a notice in the Hancock Clarion, and apply to the state, while leaving a waiting period for potential pushback from the community.
“There’s a 30-day period where people can do that protest,” Emmick said. “So no application will be approved until after that 30 days after they post their notice.”
That doesn’t likely mean that stores can begin selling alcohol 30 days after January 6, both said, because the process is dependent on two different governments handling the paperwork.
“You could be looking at 30 days, 45 days. That’s strictly a guess,” McManaway said.
Emmick sounded less hopeful but tempered her guess with more caveats.
“With us it’ll probably be really quick,” she said. “I don’t know how fast the state works but my best guess would be end of February, first of March.
“They may be lightning fast and it may be exactly 30 days after the first ad comes out. Bill’s may be able to do it 30 days from Thursday, I don’t know,” she said.
Businesses selling in the county, which includes Hawesville after they opted not to have their own ABC administrator and to fall under county jurisdiction, will also face a 5 percent regulatory license fee on gross sales, which is above the fees for the license itself. That money goes toward the expenses related to the administration, but is regulated in use and in amount.
“If there is more charged than what’s spent, because we can only use that regulatory license fee for the administration for whatever it cost us when we went wet,” she said.
Lewisport instituted the same regulatory fee, but set the amount at 0 for this year.
Without numbers to work from, this year’s fees and expenses will be estimated.
“It’s a guessing game on your first year,” Emmick said. “The second year you’ll have more solid numbers so we’ll know exactly where we need to be next year, but the first year they just give you an estimate sheet.”
