Appleton’s Safety and Licensing Committee met 05/26/2021. Alderperson Katie Van Zeeland (District 5) was excuse and Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) was absent, so the committee only had three members, but they still had a quorum so they could conduct business. It was not a long meeting and the bulk of it was taken up with a discussion about the updates to the Alcohol License Policy and regulations relating to licensing of convenience stores that sell gasoline.
City Clerk Kami Lynch went through the changes to the policy. She said that the policy is reviewed every few years because state statutes change and they wanted to make sure that everything is consistent. It has been a few years since it was last reviewed and revamped. There were no major changes and the edits were mostly just cleaning up a lot of the language to make it consistent with statutory language such as replacing “beer” with “fermented malt beverages” and “beer and liquor licensing” with “alcohol licensing”.
She said the waiting list section had been completely removed because they haven’t had a situation where there have not been enough available alcohol licenses. She mentioned that there are still a handful of Class B Liquor licenses available. They are the reserve licenses that cost $10,000, but there was no need to keep a waiting list. If they got to the point where they were running low on licenses then they would keep a waiting list, but the year round record keeping called for in the policy was not practical and not something that’s been requested by applicants.
The big question they were hoping to get direction from the committee on was the convenience store alcohol licensing regulations. For some time, the policy has stated that convenience stores that sell gasoline, i.e. gas stations, are prohibited from holding a Class A liquor license, which means they can only sell beer–not stronger stuff like wine and liquor. When they looked at that policy and tried to locate the corresponding ordinance in the municipal code, they were unable to find an ordinance that covered this. She said it looked like this policy was instituted in the early 90s, but there was no ordinance. They wanted to know if the committee wanted to continue with the practice of not allowing gas stations to sell liquor or hold a Class A liquor license, or if they wanted to change that policy. If they want to continue the current policy, they would need to draft an ordinance. Otherwise, now would be the time to remove that section from the policy and allow gas stations to have the Class A liquor licenses.
The floor was opened for question.
Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim (District 13) asked if anyone had any idea why this policy was implemented and if they had any thoughts or feelings about best practices in this area?
Police Chief Todd Thomas said that based on his previous employment experiences, policies like that addressed the issues they were seeing with a rise in drunk driving and easy access to hard liquor at gas stations. There are plenty of other places where a person can get wine and liquor. Although Appleton had no documentation on it, his assumption was concerns about drunk driving were behind the policy. He noted that they have not had anyone come forward asking for a change in the policy so that they could sell liquor at a gas station. This simply came up as part of the normal policy review process.
Alderperson Michael Smith (District 10) concurred. He said he was on Council at the time and there were strong feelings about dispensing hard alcohol at gas stations. He asked Chief Thomas what his thoughts on the issue were today.
Chief Thomas said that, obviously, it was the Council’s decision, but intoxicated driving is still an issue and continues to be one of the biggest community complaints they deal with. He reiterated that they did not have gas stations coming forward asking for a policy change. From a public safety standpoint, he thought the current policy had been working well and since there was no community demand to change it he saw no reason it should.
Alderperson Matt Reed (District 8) was curious how enforceable the current policy was without an ordinance in place.
The City Clerk said that for a city to have a policy stricter than state statute, they had have to have an ordinance in place.
Chief Thomas said that creating the ordinance would protect the city more.
Alderperson Reed restated that what they were saying was if the city wanted to continue with this policy they need to draft an ordinance.
Alderperson Smith asked what was the Police Department’s thought on keeping this regulation vs. removing it.
Chief Thomas said their preference would be to create the ordinance and codify the policy. He thought that would be the safest for the community.
Alderperson Smith said Appleton used to have a police chief who used the phrase “like pouring gasoline on a fire” in certain circumstances. Removing the policy would open the door to greater problems.
Alderperson Hartzheim thought it would be good to have more than three committee members have this discussion. She preferred that they have the clerk draft an ordinance and present it to the Council for discussion.
Alderperson Smith agreed that they were missing the input of two committee members, and the issue had just been introduced that night. He was in favor of holding the item until the next Safety and Licensing meeting to provide more time for conversation and get input from all the members.
Alderperson Hartzheim made that motion.
A person whom I took to be the city attorney said something but his microphone wasn’t on and the words were not picked up by any of the other microphones in the room.
Alderperson Smith responded his words by saying he supposed it wouldn’t hurt because that may be the next question asked anyways, then they would be prepared rather than having to hold it off again. [To me it sounded like maybe the attorney had asked if he should draft some ordinance language to have available at the next meeting and Alderperson Smith had given the go-ahead.]
Alderperson Hartzheim asked if there was any problem with holding this over now that they appeared to be in a limbo state.
Nobody saw any issue with holding it.
The motion to hold was approved 3-0
All of the other action items were approved with no discussion, and they then moved into the information items. Neither the Police Chief nor the Fire Chief had anything to report, nor were there any liquor license violations to report on.
The City Clerk did want to remind people that the 2021 Board of Review would be in Council Chambers on Thursday June 3 starting at 9AM. They had Open Book through hte Assessor’s Office through May 28, and if there was any change in a homeowner’s assessment they would have received a letter from the Assessor’s Office which the homeowner could contact with any questions. She wanted to remind people that any objections to an assessment for the Board of Review required 48 hours notice so they would have to be filed by 9AM on June 1st.
View full meeting details here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=851881&GUID=90DD0B80-77FF-4E77-89A7-F5A6D1E45B6C&Options=info|&Search=
Be the first to reply