OPINION: The fix Alaska's alcohol law rewrite needs before it passes - Anchorage Daily News
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The March 13 commentary by Lee Ellis, president of the Brewers Guild of Alaska (BGA), did a wonderful job highlighting the benefits Senate Bill 9 offers to breweries, wineries and distilleries. The benefits to existing brewers, myself included, are many, and they are significant.
But Mr. Ellis neglected to mention the very heavy price that the BGA, on behalf of its members, agreed to pay in order to secure those benefits. That price: tacit agreement with bar owners, wholesalers and distributors of alcohol that there will be no new microbreweries allowed to open in the vast majority of Alaska communities for the foreseeable future.
For decades, communities in Alaska have been permitted to have one brewery tasting room for every 3,000 residents. SB9, if not amended prior to passage, would change that in one swoop to one tasting room for every 12,000 residents. When I crunch the numbers, they show no new microbreweries would be allowed in any community outside Anchorage for years into the future. Not even in Fairbanks or Juneau.
This arbitrary and capricious change to the status quo violates free market principles and discourages entrepreneurship. It also works against Alaska’s food security: Why would we pass a new law, now, that is specifically designed to inhibit new local production of beers, wines and meads, in part to protect importers and distributors of mass-produced beverages from outside the state?
In theory, as Mr. Ellis noted, aspiring new brewers could find backdoor ways to offer their products to customers in something resembling a tasting room. But in practice, the BDL (“full bar”) licenses he mentioned are already over-subscribed and available in the secondary market only rarely, at extremely high prices.
I was happy to see that only 22 of Alaska’s 90-plus manufacturers of wine, beer and spirits signed on to Mr. Ellis’s opinion piece. It’s my understanding that the BGA had been hoping for much higher numbers, and to me, it means that there are many other existing brewers who are focused on more than their bottom line, and who want new local production to continue to flourish in Alaska.
I join Mr. Ellis in appealing to ADN readers to reach out to their representatives to ask them to pass SB9, which overall is a very positive bill. But when asking for its passage, please insist that it first be amended to keep the same population limits we’ve had for decades rather than making the limits for brewery and winery tasting rooms 400% more restrictive.
It is natural and normal for industry lobbyists to do everything in their power to ensure draft legislation reflects their interests. But our legislators have a different responsibility. They must examine new bills closely before passing them, to make sure they also reflect the public interest. SB9 in its current anti-competition, anti-entrepreneurship form, does not make the cut and needs to be amended prior to passage.
Jason Davis is the owner of Sweetgale Meadworks and Cider House in Homer.
The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to [email protected] or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.
source: https://www.adn.com/opinions/2022/03/15/opinion-the-fix-alaskas-alcohol-law-rewrite-needs-before-its-passed/
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