Clearing the bottle neck

Is Fargo’s liquor license code too complicated? Is it time for change? A new task force examines what changes could be made.

A task force in Fargo is looking at methods to reform the city’s complex liquor license code. Currently there are many different types of liquor licenses, letter coded from A to Z for different types of establishments, most of which are available for purchase if you have the funds. However, there are no more A and A-B licenses currently which are for bars that just sell liquor, on or off-sale. There will be more available once population increases. But some feel there shouldn’t be any restrictions on the number of licenses and that licenses should be more affordable. The task force was formed by the Liquor Control Board, of which Fargo City Commissioner Dave Piepkorn is Chairman. He spoke with HPR and laid out his goals for the task force. Ultimately, the City Commission will decide on their recommendations.

“It’s very complicated because we have so many licenses and we have so many different hoops to jump through. What I am hoping for is we have a simpler system and that we also make it a little easier for new businesses to start up, that’s my main thing. I am looking forward to what they come up with but our challenge is the people that have licenses and have had them for a long time, they’re fairly valuable and for us to work out a system where the city buys them back, that’s going to be the complicated part of it,” Piepkorn said.

Community builder Joe Burgum approached the Liquor Control Board about making changes to the liquor license code after gathering public opinion on the matter. They formed a task force after reading the opinions he collected.

“I think that there are some challenges within the current system that if changed, it would look like a new system. So this idea that we need to scrap or start over, I don’t know if it is the right question to be spending time on. I think it’s things like how many licenses there are ought to be,” Burgum told HPR. “And when we’ve been talking about the new system, it’s really simplifying it in a lot of ways to fewer license types that cover more breadth or scope. Are you interested in on-sale? Are you interested in off-sale? Are you going to do beer and wine? Are you going to do spirits? Are you going to have food or no food? If you follow that rubric, that kind of gets you to all the licenses we have now but we could in fewer steps.“

The only person who feels the current liquor license code isn’t too complex, is the man with the most experience implementing it, Fargo City Auditor Steve Sprague who is the city’s liaison with business for administering and approving licenses along with the Liquor Control Board. He thinks we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

“I work awfully close with it so it kind of takes some of the complexity away from it. It may seem complex to some people that don’t work with it on a daily basis. I don’t know that we need to throw the whole system out and start all over. There may be an opportunity to make some enhancements or improvements to the system, possibly some simplification but I think the system that we’ve got has worked for many years and there’s really no reason that it can’t continue to work, “ Sprague said.

Sprague said it is a misconception that liquor licenses in Fargo aren’t affordable. He said it just depends on the type of license you want to buy.

“For $500, you could have beer on-sale, you could have a place that serves beer for $500. That’s not that outrageous. Now if you want to be able to do on and off-sale and liquor, beer and wine, then it’s a little more expensive. One of the ideas that was brought to the committee the last time that we met was to have more of a sliding scale, the initial fee based on occupancy or some kind of a matrix like that would say this is a small place, the occupancy is only 30 so the license fee for that one is going to be X number of dollars whereas here’s a great big facility potential calls for service and other things that cause problems to the city which are much greater so the initial fee is even more than we’re charging now so that’s something that we’ll continue to look at,” Sprague remarked.

One issue the task force will take a hard look at is the capping of licenses and whether or not more should be added, in particular in downtown Fargo. There are some who feel the issues of overconsumption are already being felt and adding more bars would only exacerbate that.

“Downtown, do we want to have more opportunities for smaller liquor establishments or do people feel that we have enough? Our population is growing and we are a lot different than we were 30 years ago, it’s really a challenge. I do think we don’t need to be in a big rush. Just take it slowly and make sure we do a good job because it would be a big job if we did something as far as eliminating the system that we have now,” Commissioner Piepkorn said.

Steve Sprague thinks if restrictions were removed on the number of bars that just serve liquor were removed, it would lead to more problems in the city.

“There are no restrictions on licenses that have food. We really like that marriage of food and alcohol. It tends to cut down on calls for service and different things like that. I think that might be a little bit of a misconception that there aren’t licenses available. There are plenty of licenses available, it’s just we control the number of street bars that have no requirements for what they are selling. I don’t know that we are going to just open that up and make it a free market type of thing because along with that, you are increasing the number of facilities that you need to do server training for, the number of employees and then the number of compliance checks. If you have more establishments selling alcohol, you have the potential of having more calls for service and more domestic disputes. I think you need to go cautiously into some of that,” Sprague told HPR.

Community activist Burgum doesn’t believe that the number of bars necessarily will result in more problems. He feels it’s more about changing the over consumption drinking culture of the community than it is about the number of establishments we license to sell it.

“It is a fundamental sort of logic structure of correlated or causal meaning that are two things related or are the two things tied together and so when we have this discussion about, oh if we have more licenses, we’re going to have to more drunks, that’s an assumption that licenses equal drunkenness and that actually is not inherent fact. They may be correlated, but they are not causal, so I try to shy away from using the word bar as it’s a little bit of a loaded word. In our community bars are often associated with what I’d call street bars, kind of our dive bars in Fargo,” Burgum said “We’ve been talking more about the structure and what problems we are trying to solve around the economic bottleneck, around the cultural bottleneck and then what’s really in the best interest of the community which in my mind, is not necessarily about bars or any type of drinking establishment, it’s about those negative results. It’s about the overdrinking, the overconsumption, the mismanagement of licenses, those are more problems for the community, not inherently that some location serves alcohol.”

Another change the task force will take a look at is potential changes to off-sale licenses, which some said drove Costco to build in West Fargo because of Fargo’s restrictive liquor license code.

“I think we had things kind of worked out with Costco and then they found a piece of land that was a little bit more to their liking so financially Costco made the decision to go someplace else to open. Some people would consider Cashwise Grocery a big box and yet they’ve managed to get a Cashwise liquor store opened and I don’t think that was any problem or anything like that,” Sprague replied.

Burgum feels there is areas where the current license code as it relates to off-sale could be updated.

“There are the new off-sale licenses which are tied to population. There’s also the historic B licenses and so it will be up for discussion. It hasn’t been specifically addressed yet in terms of the number of off-sale establishments. Right now, I think this is an interesting tidbit so the new off-sale licenses are added with every 10,000 people per census. In a city like St. Paul, they are added every 5,000 and so I think even on the tie to population, I think there’s an opportunity for us there to update it,” Burgum remarked.

Piepkorn says the task force has no set time frame of when to make recommendations but it will take time to make them and go to both the Liquor Control Board with them and the City Commission which will allow for ample time for the public to make their input heard on them.

“The subcommittee will first go to the Liquor Control Board and then from there it would pass on to the City Commission so the public will have a lot of opportunities to see what we’re doing and also comment on it too. This is probably a couple months away,” Piepkorn said.

Burgum believes this time is different than other attempts to reform the system and he scoffs at the notion this is all about the good old boys network getting together in a smoke filled room and coming up with minimal changes to the liquor license laws.

“I think the committee we have is well represented from a diverse background and we are all on the same team, we all want Fargo to be a great place to live, we all want to support small business and it’s really about the tactical aspects of that. I think this conversation is different than past liquor reform conversations that no one’s trying to be outed, I think in the past there’s been this air that’s it’s the new vs. the old school and it’s the good old boys which I think is a myth. We have people that invested in this community that have been operating in this community for a long time and they want to protect the work that they’ve done and that is completely understandable,” Burgum said.

Burgum also hopes a community dialogue is started about binge drinking as well when the task force recommendations are completed.

“We can have a community dialogue around what consumption is because I think in general we need to sober up to what consumption looks like in our community. Regardless of new structure or no structure, we have over consumption and that isn’t inherently tied to the number of establishments, it’s more of a cultural norm,” Burgum stated.