Posted on 10/02/2006 12:28:59 PM PDT by weegee
'Dry' counties are drying up in Texas
Even more are putting the liquor option to voters since easing of law
LUFKIN — Sarah Strinden is tired of what she calls the "pain-in-the-neck" drive she must take as a consequence of Texas' patchwork of local liquor laws.
From her house it's a 10-mile jaunt to the metal-sided beer barns and package stores in either of two adjoining wet counties. ''We don't buy a lot and store it, so when we're planning a casual drink with friends it's a 40-minute trip," she said. ''It's just inconvenient."
Strinden and others in Angelina County will vote in November whether to allow beer and wine in their grocery and convenience stores as well as whether restaurants can serve beer, wine and mixed drinks.
The vote comes as part of a wave of local-option elections that are steadily ''wetting up" the more populous parts of Texas. Lufkin's Baptist churches and others are mounting a campaign to keep their corner of East Texas dry, but trends are not on their side.
Since late 2003, when changes in state law made it easier to put alcohol on local ballots, there have been 177 elections across the state to legalize some form of alcohol sales. A lopsided 82 percent have passed, according to the Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission.
Far fewer dry counties Conversely, no wet areas have voted to go dry.
Today, only 42 of Texas' 254 counties are completely dry, fewer than half the number in 1975, when there were 87. And each year several more fall from the list. Located mostly in West Texas and the Panhandle, 28 of the state's dry counties have populations of fewer than 10,000.
Angelina County, with 82,036 residents, is the second-most-populous dry county in the state behind Smith County, population 188,122, and its chief city of Tyler.
"Beer and wine in grocery stores and the possibility of a drink with a restaurant meal is what's in demand with most Texans," said Glen Garey, general counsel for the Texas Restaurant Association. "We don't get much push-back on those options."
Frowning on bars Petitions and elections seeking other types of alcohol sales such as bars or liquor stores have failed to attract business backing and campaign money and more frequently have failed, state records show. In short, beer joints, topless bars and hard liquor by the bottle are a much tougher sell.
Garey's organization, which represents the state's $29 bil- lion-a-year food-service industry, was the driving force behind several little-noticed changes in state law in 2003 that made it easier to hold wet-dry elections. The new law lowered the number of signatures required for ballot petitions, doubled the amount of time given for signatures to be gathered and dropped several red-tape requirements that made it impossible to hold alcohol elections in some cities.
"Getting on the ballot is everything," said Oscar Dillahunty, 69, a retired beer distributor who is leading alcohol proponents in Lufkin, a timber and manufacturing hub 120 miles north of Houston. "We'll have a campaign, but I don't think it will matter. Our poll shows two-thirds of people here are for this."
Dillahunty, whose committee has gathered campaign money from an area beer distributor, a grocery chain and Wal-Mart, among others, said sales taxes on at least $15 million worth of alcohol sales a year are being siphoned off by neighboring Nacogdoches and Trinity counties.
"That's something when we have a sheriff's department that needs raises," he said.
Kip Miller, president of Angelina Savings Bank, said, "From a businessman's standpoint, this is going to make it easier for us to attract restaurants and maybe an upscale grocery store, where you can pick up a bottle of wine and some real Parmesan cheese."
Then there are proponents such as Sarah Strinden and her husband, Bill, who calls the county's dry status "silly."
Bill Strinden, a plastic surgeon, said he has watched Lufkin's medical community grow from about 40 doctors when he arrived 18 years ago to 150 today.
"You can see tremendous growth here. We have a lot of the same stores they have in Dallas," he said. "But being a dry county is a throwback to a time when we were a backwater, small Southern town."
Alcohol opponents say going wet will have negative consequences.
"Studies show you have an increase in crime when you increase alcohol outlets," said Lee Miller, a Lufkin public relations expert running the opposition campaign.
Jack Williams, an opposition leader who said he got involved at the request of his pastor, said Lufkin has a thriving economy even without alcohol sales. "We don't need it," he said.
Bill Mead, owner of the Christian Words and Works bookstore, said he thinks greed is motivating the alcohol push.
"Their side is popular, but they can be overcome," said Mead, who said he plans to man a phone bank on Election Day with other members of the Denman Avenue Baptist Church.
Opponents warn about crime and drunken driving, but with alcohol readily available "across the river" and more than 20 restaurants and social organizations serving drinks as private clubs, the Lufkin area already hosts its share of alcohol-related social ills. Over the first eight months of this year, 264 DWI cases were filed in Angelina County, records show.
"We're the wettest dry county in the state," Dillahunty said.
John Hatch, who is one of several political consultants in Texas who has made a specialty out of promoting wet measures, said it is easy to quantify the tax revenue liquor sales can bring. A grocery store is likely to sell $25,000 worth of beer and wine a week, and the largest can sell as much as $150,000 weekly, he said.
In 2004, Hatch noted, the eastern Dallas suburb of Rowlett voted in beer and wine. Residents had previously bought their beer in a handful of stores in Mobile City, a trailer park along Interstate 30 that incorporated in 1990 to become the only wet jurisdiction in Rockwall County. In 2005, without Rowlett's beer and wine customers, Mobile City's sale tax reimbursements dropped 22 percent, state comptroller records show.
Dry in the Heights Garey, with the restaurant association, said parts of the state's largest cities — the Heights in Houston, among others — have remained dry because it would take a citywide petition to put the issue before voters.
"That's a lot of signatures," he said, explaining that nobody has enough interest in the matter to pay for such an expensive petition drive.
In 2005, the Legislature approved a bill that would have allowed alcohol in restaurants to go to voters in the big cities without requiring a petition. But Gov. Rick Perry vetoed it, saying that the dual process of a petition and an election ensured local control of neighborhoods.
Some of the strongest opposition to changing liquor laws across the state has come from self-interested competitors, Hatch said.
A defeat in Texarkana In May, Texarkana defeated the sale of beer and wine in grocery stores after an opposition group ran a series of TV ads including one that cast a six-pack as a competitor with church.
Campaign reports detailing contributions before that election show that nearly all of the approximately $90,000 raised by the group came from liquor stores and distributors across the state line in wet Arkansas, which for decades has been drawing Texas customers.
Because Arkansas bans Sunday sales, the Texas side of the city would have had a leg up one day of the week had beer and wine sales there been approved.
"It was a real war," said Hatch, whose clients lost the campaign by several hundred votes. "There was a lot of money at stake."
I heard awhile back one of the last dry counties in Kansas was actually allowing restaurants to serve liquor! The travesty.
Actually, the dry/wet elections are by precincts.
Littering is not manly..so Hold muh beer bottle till you get home then recycle!!!
Does this mean the end of the "private club" ripoff at the bars, to make a few extra bucks and circumvent the liquor laws?
Of course, your average New Orleanian is on a first-name basis with at least half a dozen bartenders by the time s/he turns 21, or in some cases 18, but y'know...
Good. I hate the nanny-state.
There are even some dry blocks in Houston (the Historic Heights) but in and around Dallas I found alcohol sales to be spotty.
When Lollapalooza played there in the late 1990s (final Ramones tour, and that was the only act I went to see and about the only I remember besides the Shaolin monks exhibition), they played a field near Dallas in a dry county. Anyone who wanted to buy a beer had to buy a "membership" to drink. Why it couldn't have been included WITH the ticket purchase, I don't know (then again, I didn't buy a ticket, I got on the list).
We still have to make some Sunday beer runs to the Ohio border here in Indiana.
Bans on alcohol sales on Sundays (partial or total) are commonly accepted. Even 2am-7am bans are accepted.
When will the government restrict the hours of tobacco sales?
That's right.
I live in a county in West TX that is 'wet' but our precinct is dry.
It's a 30-mile round trip to the nearest available beer/wine store.
I personally don't mind, as I drink very little, but I wonder if it came up for a vote if things would change.
Here in Dallas the "private club" thing is widely flouted and costs nothing.
I always viewed dry laws as favoring those businesses which set up their drive-through liquor sales just outside dry counties. I imagine they are the ones who most strongly favor the status quo.
There might be a restriction on selling the "membership" with the ticket because of the way the private club exception works. You may not be able to bundle the membership with anything else, such as permission to enter the event. I don't know for sure, though.
Impact and Abilene...best Texas example.
The reason for the separation is because the "membership" must be a completely separate item. It can not be sold with any other item. Liquor laws in Texas are some real doozies so I got out of the business.
Wet street, dry areas, license for beer, or drinks, or midnight, 2 oclock blah blah
In La., the grocery stores have liquor isles and no restrictions on Sunday purchases.
In Tx., liguor is sold by liguor stores, closed on Sundays.
In Tx., beer & wine sold in grocery stores and can be sold after 12:00pm on Sunday.
It used to be that Baptist sent their children to Hardin Simmons University in Abiline because the nearest known sin (a wet precinct) was 60 miles away.
The article mentions that sellers in Arkansas were among those supporting the ban.
I was trying to find a wine for my ex in Salt Lake and found to my amusement that the liquor sales in Utah are handled by state agents. All liquor in Utah is under state control
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